Highways to a War
Built around the disappearance of a war photographer, this novel follows memory and testimony across Cambodia. Personal experience and historical violence overlap until the reality of war emerges with unsettling clarity.
Work Information
As the search for a missing friend continues, the shape of war slowly comes into view.
Against the backdrop of reporting from Cambodia’s war, the story moves through one man’s disappearance and the testimonies gathered around it. It examines the distance between reportage and private memory while tracing the human lives caught in violence.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Penguin Publishing Group
- Published
- 1996-06-01
- Pages
- 496 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 12.8 x 2.8 x 19.6 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780140247572
- ISBN-10
- 0140247572
- Price
- 5526 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Genre Fiction/War
“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
Christopher J. Koch (1932–2013) was an acclaimed Australian novelist from Hobart, Tasmania. He is best known for The Year of Living Dangerously , which was made into an award-winning film. He was twice awarded the Miles Franklin Award, Australia's top literary honor, for The Doubleman in 1985 and for Highways to a War in 1993.
Reviews
-
Three Stars
Its reportage but interesting.
-
Please read.
Totally brilliant and evocative. I have re read this several times. And truly enjoyed it.
-
great
I was an MP, Military Policeman, in Saigon, 69-70. Koch captures the feel of the place and people magnificently. It was fun to read about the streets and other locations that I patrolled for 12 months. Koch is a wonderful writer. The book is a great tale of the end of the war and its effects on the people. He also writes of the horror that was Cambodia. Highly recommended Loren W. Christensen, author of Policing Saigon.
-
Good look back to Asia in the early’70’s
I reread Koch’s more famous “A Year of Living Dangerously” and enjoyed it enough to get Highways. Worth reading and in someways a better story. A little preachy in one or two places but certainly worth reading.
-
Five Stars
brilliant read