Women in Christopher Koch’s Novels

SIR: In her review (March 2008) of Christopher Koch’s latest novel The Memory Room, Sophie Masson drew attention to several of Koch’s major female characters, listing these as forerunners to the character of Erika Lange. Masson described Erika as “a kind of culmination and distillation” of a listing of female characters in what might be termed a chronological progression of Koch’s better-known novels.

As Masson’s choice of words suggests, and as anyone who studies writing knows, an alchemy that transcends analysis takes place in fiction. However, at the risk of seeming at first to present a scholastic dissection reminiscent of angels pirouetting on pinpoints, I draw attention also to the schoolgirl who appears briefly, early in The Doubleman. This charming little figure, presented in the nostalgic manner perfected by Koch, seems also to be a precursor of Erika:

A pallid, delicate-looking blonde girl of about twelve, whose name I never knew, passed each day at four on her way home from school; she would look up and smile at me, from under her brown felt hat. Her face was wistful, perhaps tragic, and I waited for her every afternoon, telling myself that I loved her.

Some months ago, Frank Devine remarked that Koch’s earlier novel Across the Sea Wall (1965) bears further examination, and this too is fruitful in evaluation of the modelling of the character of Erika. When reading The Memory Room myself, I was struck by the sensation that Erika was familiar—re-reading Across the Sea Wall, the reason for this sensation was made clear, as I became reacquainted with the character of Ilsa Kalnins. It is as though this character, drawn even in this earlier and much shorter work with Koch’s wonderful sympathy and skill, had been revisited.

Using the Sirius edition of 1982 (Koch’s revised version) I draw particular attention to certain passages in which Ilsa manifests the romantic figure of a girl in an overcoat and hat, who stands beside one of those highways to the Otherworld that register so frequently in Koch’s writing. One such passage occurs early in the novel, setting the tone for what follows. This enigmatic, alluring and ultimately tragic female is a Northerner, a blonde European, and one whose spirit, like that of Erika, is deeply damaged by her past. Neither Ilsa nor Erika is blameless as to the course of their lives, for each has their human flaws. Masson asserts that “[t]here is no moralising in Koch’s novels”. I would qualify this: Koch seldom moralises directly, and it is the larger reality that must be observed, as well as the detail in his work. Masson is more accurate in her assertion that Koch “never preaches”, although in The Doubleman, Richard Miller tells Deidre Dillon directly that she might be safer with the church’s mysteries than with New Age moonshine! In The Memory Room and Across the Sea Wall, it depends upon the moral economy of the reader as to which female is less to blame for her personal difficulties, but each is handicapped severely by the actions of others in her past.

In terms of Erika Lange’s ancestry as a character, another passage that occurs at about the middle of Across the Sea Wall is particularly telling in relation to both Ilsa and Erika and perhaps to the authorial work of Koch himself:

he would nurture from now on the picture of a young woman standing against the panorama of a night-time highway: a refugee, forever on the edge of journey, dressed in a gaberdine overcoat and shapeless felt hat that belonged to the 1940s and the war: a woman who was Ilsa and yet not …

At this novel’s close, the protagonist Robert O’Brien finally concludes his physical affair with Ilsa. However, the romantic fantasy figure that she signifies for him remains lodged in his consciousness in a perturbing way. There is a clear acknowledgment that this figure (conflated forever for O’Brien with the troubled and all-too-human Ilsa) will remain with him, locked both inside and outside of time, travelling always on a futile quest. It seems a pity to have omitted Ilsa Kalnins as perhaps the most significant precursor of Erika Lange.

These earlier passages intrigue the casual and the more serious reader (for I have been both) and indicate that one of the reasons for Koch’s increasing stature as a writer is that his foundations have been so carefully crafted. In his first essay in Crossing the Gap (1987) Koch maintained that writers examine and re-work the past to find out “what it really contained”. Though arrived at enjoyably, poignantly and far less simplistically than the following bald statement, in his recent paired novels, Out of Ireland/Highways to a War, the conclusion was that the revolutionary ideas espoused by the ancestor in one century caused his seed to be blotted out in the next. If this is not pointing a moral, I would have difficulty in knowing what it actually does represent! The destiny of Erika, spiritual descendant of Ilsa, is no less harsh.

In Koch’s examination and depiction of his country’s “soul”, for this seems to me to be the true nature of his work, it is as though this admirable Australian artist has surveyed an earlier canvas, selected a figure of particularly enduring interest, then re-imagined this figure meticulously and logically in the context of a later era. Given the zeitgeist of that era, as deafening and as hollow as a drum, Erika’s fate is grim but inevitable. Pauline Farley, Attadale, WA.