Simon Leys The Australian. A review of the new Christopher Koch novel, The Memory Room
And finally — in the end is the beginning — there is Tasmania. It has been said that childhood is the inkwell of every poet, and Koch’s inkwell is evidently of Tasmanian make. In a way, one might perhaps say that no writer can be more quintessentially Australian than a writer who hails from that remote island. Mainland writers used to dream of faraway Europe; for Tasmanian writers, however, that dream of an elsewhere twice removed must have exerted double fascination. Like Gatsby wistfully gazing at the distant lights on the other side of the water (another great inspiration for Koch), the adolescent poets of Tasmania first dreamed of the big cities across Bass Strait; their urge to escape must be even more intense than the one experienced by their peers in Melbourne and Sydney, and when at last they discover the outside world, the impact of the European and the Asian revelations must be all the more momentous. Yet, in the end, when they return to their starting point, they can finally realise, like the protagonist of The Memory Room, that — as always — the journey we undertook to faraway worlds was in fact a journey deep into ourselves.
