Highways to a War
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
“A gripping tale . . . A convincing, page-turning evocation of recent history.”—The New York Times
Ray Barton travels to war-ravaged Southeast Asia to search for his missing friend Michael Langford, a brilliant, risk-taking combat photographer who was stolen into Khmer Rouge Cambodia on a mysterious mission and disappeared. The search illuminates Langford’s heroism, his fierce loyalties, and the personal highways he has traveled to war. Langford’s empathy for the brave but poorly commanded Cambodian troops and his love for a young Cambodian woman have led him in the end to put down the camera and take up the gun in a foreign struggle he had made his own.
Koch richly evokes Indochina—from the deceptively tranquil rice paddies of South Vietnam to the corrupt, doomed pink-and-white city of Phnom Penh. Highways to a War is a story of intense relationships forged in a dangerous and hallucinatory land that continues to haunt the American soul.
“An absorbing, deeply moving . . . tale of love and heroism. . . . The evocation of the Cambodian landscape . . . is truly haunting.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Highways to a War ranks among the best of the . . . literature that has come out of the agony of the wars in Southeast Asia.”—The Orlando Sentinel
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Koch (The Year of Living Dangerously) spins another war-correspondent story, but this one has an elegiac tone that borders on the saccharine. Set in the unusual landscape of Tasmanian hop farms and in the more-chronicled territory of Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1960s and '70s, the narrative focuses on Mike Langford, an Australian-born war photographer who has disappeared inside Cambodia. Told mainly through first-person ``interviews'' conducted by Langford's boyhood friend Ray Barton, this is a fragmented tale, substantially hampered by a long opening section, which wades through Langford's youth but fails to create much complexity in the hero. The adult Langford, a boyish blond prone to winking and acts of battlefield courage, isn't much deeper. But as the various narrators tell their stories and fill in the blanks, the plot picks up steam. In Phnom Penh, we find, not surprisingly, that Langford secretly took a hand in Cambodia's tangled politics. Ironically, however, secondary characters like a retired Australian spook and a boorish Russo-Parisian photographer far outshine the angelic Langford in both depth and appeal. Similarly, in the various narrators interviewed by Barton, Koch hits an interesting blend of intelligence and vulnerability, capturing the voices of journalists and old hands whose business it is to be cautious and watchful. This is especially true of Jim Feng, Langford's best friend, whose account of a grisly march along the Ho Chi Minh Trail is the novel's high point. Ultimately, however, the narrative is sunk by its bland hero, in spite of the atmosphere conjured by a veteran of the terrain. 35,000 first printing.
