Happy Publication Day to Jamie Grant for Landscape Written In His Face: People, Places and Ideas in the Life and Work of Christopher Koch, the first in our Bonfire Monograph Series. Jamie blessedly does not use social media and he will probably be on the golf course when this gets sent, but nevertheless we wish him all the best.
Jamie was born in the 1940s and is one of the last remaining links to an Australian literary milieu that included, among many luminaries, Les Murray, Robert Gray, Geoffrey Lehmann, and most relevant for today, Christopher Koch, Australia’s best-selling literary novelist. Many, including Jamie, would say he is Australia’s greatest novelist. Jamie and Christopher were friends and collaborators for nearly forty years. To proofread Koch’s later novels, he and Jamie would read the entire manuscript aloud to each other, pausing to note essential changes and mistakes, a process that could take several weeks.
Koch averaged one novel every seven years in a leisurely career that seems scarcely replicable these days. Without doubt the peak of his career was his third novel, The Year Living Dangerously (1978), which was made into a successful film by Peter Weir. The Year of Living Dangerously was one of the first prominent Australian novels to deal with our neighbours to the north in Asia, though it was not the first of Koch’s novels to do so. Probably my favourite novel of his, Across The Sea Wall , follows young Australians in the 1950s becoming waylaid in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and finally, India, on that forgotten rite of passage, the sea voyage to Europe. Koch never shied away from what some may call the harsh truths of life and Across The Sea Wall features a few of the more brutal lessons a young man needs to learn, which are mostly about the true nature of himself.
Unlike many Australian writers who marinated in the fashion for secularism of the late twentieth century, Koch maintained an awareness and appreciation for the mysteries of the spiritual life and the unseen realities behind the material world. He returned time and time again in both contemporary and historical fiction as well as non-fiction, to his native Tasmania, which, like many of his characters, he longed to leave for the bright lights of the Big Island and beyond. He had a keen traditional novelists’ sense of description, character and plot, leading some to characterise his work as “airport fiction”, a designation Koch loathed, and yet his work feels contemporary long after more “experimental” writers have come and gone.
Koch was and still is an integral part of Australian literary culture and was a key figure in the late twentieth century flowering of Australian letters. With a masculine sense of truth-telling Jamie gives us an insider’s look at some of the relationships that drove this flowering as well as close textual reading of what made Koch’s work so strong and unique. The prose portion of the book ends with a letter from Koch reconciling with his estranged friend Les Murray, and we are profoundly grateful to Christopher’s widow Robin Koch for permission to publish it.
The book itself ends with a tribute poem by Jamie to his friend Christopher Koch, as they walk together through the Coal River Valley near Koch’s final home in Richmond, Tasmania. The title of the book, Landscape Written In His Face, is adapted from one of the lines in the poem.
The book will be launched at an event at the State Library of Tasmania, Hobart, tomorrow night, May 14th at 6pm. Come along if you are able. Jamie will be speaking about his friendship with Christopher and The Year of Living Dangerously will be screened: Full details here.
Landscape Written In His Face is available through the Bonfire website here.
Or for overseas readers at Amazon here.