Memory, Imagination, and Identity in Secret Intelligence : Christopher Koch's The Memory Room

Memory, Imagination, and Identity in Secret Intelligence : Christopher Koch's The Memory Room single work criticism

Author:agent Bruce Bennett

Issue Details: First known date: 2009... 2009 Memory, Imagination, and Identity in Secret Intelligence : Christopher Koch's The Memory Room

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'Sometimes a novel emerges in a culture that touches the nerve of its times even though it is set a generation or so earlier. Dickens's Bleak House is a novel of this kind. The institutions of law remain forever colored by Dickens's satiric observations in this novel. Christopher Koch is not a satirist, but his novel Highways to a War (1995) remains the most memorable of the spate of novels that explored Australia's military involvement in the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1960s and 70s. Koch's latest novel, The Memory Room (2007), set in China and Australia in the early 1980s, has a similar impact and again recalls events some twenty-five years earlier, with a focus on the profession of secret intelligence.' (p. 109)