Highways to a War

Rating:
Summary: Koch's Worst...Yet?
Review: After reading this book, I was fairly disappointed that i had spent my week's pocket money buying it. Koch's attempt at trying to create intrest in a theme (war) that is by now fairly tired is a sad effort. The book has no appeal, and on many occasions i was diverted for reading to something more interesting (like taking out the garbage). I strongly reccomend that you look at his earlier writing efforts if you are in search for a good read.

Rating:
Summary: But Some Highways are more Direct than Others...
Review: I take my hat off to Koch and give five stars to the job he does in re-creating the ambiance of Saigon and Phnom Penh during the war. But when I average in the zero stars for the nearly 100 page introduction he gives his protagonist, the war correspondent Mike Langford, and the zero stars for credibility, he ends up with three. Credibility? NVA captains simply were not giving three day tours of the Ho Chi Minh Trail to war correspondents, then releasing them. And Langford's mad rush to return to Cambodia after it had fallen? Sorry. But still, Koch evokes the "Sweet Bird of Youth" with his retrospective of Saigon street life. Memo to Christopher Koch: next time, color code the pages containing the story, so we can more easily skip the filler.

Rating:
Summary: Settle back for the ride
Review: This is a big book, lumbering in structure, almost Victorian in the way it mucks about before settling into the yarn - but it winds up rich and troubling and moving and difficult to forget. Rather too obviously based on the life of famed war cameraman Neil Davis, it follows its hero from sylvan days in the hopfields of Tasmania to the warzones of Vietnam and Cambodia. The evocations of scented Asia, the journo/GI milieu, the chaos of battle are extremely strong.

Over time the hero's naive idealism is forged into - um, experienced idealism, as he comes to identify with the Cambodian people in particular. His ultimate fate is almost operatic in its awfulness.

The French have a word - sillage - which means the ineffable scent left in the air by a woman's passing. This book leaves a sillage. It is the gentle wash of sadness of the old survivors of those horrible South-East Asian wars, as they calculate the prices paid, and wonder at their meaning.

I recommend this book. It is like an old-fashioned Sunday roast - not necessarily the meal you'd choose, but richly satisfying at the end.