Adrift in a perilous kingdom: Christopher Koch's The Memory Room.

Few of us consciously make contact with that sub-world of espionage which is the myth kingdom of our century.

Thus MUSES THE NARRATOR, Cookie, in Christopher Koch's earlier novel The Year of Living Dangerously. Spies, and their secrets, make fleeting yet often important appearances in more than one Koch novel. Their elusive, background presence helps to create the sense of there being more than one meaning to events; their shadowy imperatives can seem almost otherworldly, a gnostic theatre hidden behind the screen of everyday life, and a pale reflection of the grander metaphysical theatre of the eternal struggle between good and evil. As well, many Koch novels feature spy-like professional observers--journalists, researchers and such--as ambiguous narrators and commenters, as well as peripheral actors in the drama. But The Memory Room is the first time that an actual spy is centre stage, and this fact creates an atmosphere that is both richly and intensely familiar, and yet also arrestingly strange.

The Memory Room is the story of three childhood friends: Vincent Austin, who is recruited at university for ASIS, the overseas-focused branch of the Australian secret services; Erika Lange, his closest, dearest friend, who becomes a famous journalist; and Derek Bradley, who joins the Department of Foreign Affairs and becomes a diplomat. Bradley, the "most normal" of the three, is the one who is left to tell the story--and learn its full ramifications--after the other two have passed out of the picture, for various reasons. A sometime lover of the mercurial, disturbed and disturbing Erika, Bradley is also a sensual counterpoint to Vincent, who is almost monk-like, asexual and ascetic despite his complete lack of puritanism.

Vincent loves Erika dearly, but not in a sexual way; she loves him dearly too, and he is the only one who understands her completely. Early on, we are told Vincent lost his mother at birth and his twin brother Douglas at the age of eight; Erika has become, in a sense, his lost twin, his alter ego, his anima, his soul mate. After they grow up, Bradley somewhat loses touch with the others; but their lives intersect again in China in the early 1980s, where certain events--and a disastrous decision by Vincent--will change everything forever.

The attraction of the spy as a central character is a strong one for a novelist. Novelists of course are also spies of a sort: watching and listening to people in secret is part of the job description. I think that many of us also flatter ourselves that we could be real spies, if push came to shove. And though that's a complacent fantasy, by and large, it's true that some of us have been spies, both in the past and now: think of John Buchan, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Ian Fleming, Vladimir Volkoff, John le Carre, and most recently, the ex-chief of MI5, Stella Rimington, and ex-ASIS operative Warren Reed (who was one of the sources for Koch's novel).

Most of these writers, however, with the exceptions of Greene, Volkoff, Maugham and le Carre, chose mainly to frame the experiences they gained in the intelligence services in the guise of more or less conventional spy thrillers. Even those four don't frame the narrative almost entirely within the world of espionage. But what the reader encounters in The Memory Room, while it is as gripping as a thriller, is an extraordinary, multi-layered, beautifully written story where the central mystery is not one of espionage revelations or superpower machinations (though we get glimpses and echoes of these, and some very interesting and wide-ranging political discussions), but the central mystery of Being, the journey of the soul.

Like Vincent Austin, the novel asks: Is a spy born, or made? On the surface, this may seem like the old nature-versus-nurture conundrum. But it is a spy's question, and thus not straightforward. Is it a strength or a flaw that makes someone a good spy? Is it a gift or a curse? Many, maybe most, people cannot keep even ordinary secrets. Their actions are often reactions, and so predictable, easily manipulated. Or so it could be seen by a spy. The gnosis of espionage is intensely attractive to guarded, clever, cool personalities, like Vincent's, and yet that gnosis is also intensely attractive to deluded and disturbed people, fantasists, crackpot believers in conspiracy theories and secret messages and hidden histories.

Then, a spy will need to keep secrets from his or her nearest and dearest; to pretend, to play a role. Is the ability to do that a good or a bad thing? Psychopaths are also adept at pretence and role-playing and exult in secret knowledge; their--literally--diseased souls are so deformed they appear almost inhuman, diabolical. Is that at the heart of a spy's being, too? Of course, like the armed forces, intelligence services will try to weed out obvious psychopaths and fantasists; for this reason, recruiting officers might well be wary of people who think of themselves as "born spies". Besides, in our times and in the bureaucracy that is the intelligence services, a "made" spy may well be more highly regarded.

A "made" spy--formed, trained, obeying the rules--may suit the system best. The "born spy" will still be wanted for his natural gift; but only if this can be subsumed to the training. And so it is, with Vincent, until the episode in early 1980s China, when his romantic questing-knight idealism drives out caution, reflection and patience. It is a reckless episode that not only endangers himself but also his colleagues and especially Professor Liu Meng, the gentle Chinese scholar whom he has befriended, and the professor's wife Dorothy.

It is indicative of a flaw of understanding: a young man from a free society, he does not really understand, deep down, how totalitarianism works and what it can do to its victims. Even if he has read widely on totalitarianism, discussed it with his university mentor, Dr Bobrowski--who as a Pole has had personal experience of both Nazism and communism--and observed it for himself in action in China, Vincent still fails to imaginatively comprehend the way the system instils personal bone-deep terror. And how some things cannot be readily fixed by an individual idealist, however brave and well-meaning.

From that episode on, Vincent is deemed to be reckless and thus unreliable as far as the service is concerned. It is a crushing blow; but he takes it stoically, even admirably. Exiled to the "memory room", or archives section, in Canberra, suffering from his demotion, he still contrives to make himself some kind of life, still hugging secrets to himself. A lonely and compromised but courageous figure, he is still close to his soul-mate Erika, whose star has risen even as his has faded, but who is even more at risk than he is of a spectacular fall. For both of them share a kind of doom that is alien to the more stable, cherished and centred Bradley. At heart, they are changeling children, adrift in a perilous kingdom. And the reasons for that go back a long way; back into the heart of their childhoods, and their beings.

BOTH BORN under the sign of Gemini, Vincent and Erika share a deep kinship from the moment they meet, a feeling that they are not only alike, but twinned: really one spirit, split into two different people. In childhood, neither of them lives in a conventional family, unlike Bradley: Vincent is an only child, his father having died as well, when Vincent was twelve. His mother's sister, Connie Ross, looks after him, as she has done since his mother's death. Meanwhile, Erika lives alone with her German father Dietrich, who was once a Luftwaffe pilot. Her mother is dead, "from a wasting disease", as she tells Vincent. Her relationship with her father is frighteningly ambiguous and disturbing; we are never told in so many words, but soon understand that the dark secret at its heart has permanently damaged her.

These wounded children find solace in each other, and in their "Secret Room", a storeroom at Aunt Connie's house, where they discuss and share the things they love most: music and books and comics. Their tastes are alike, which draws them closer still. And they discover they share a love of conspiracy, of mystery, of secrets. As Vincent says, in the diaries he keeps over several years and which Bradley reads to try and piece together the mystery of his lost friends:

   At first it wasn't even voiced; it could only be expressed by
   saying that we recognised each other. And what we recognised was
   that we were both in love with secrecy. Many adolescents are, of
   course; but with us it was different. With us, it was a passion,
   central to our beings.

Secrecy soon becomes an otherworld for them; their secret kingdom in Aunt Connie's storeroom. Their myth kingdom, if you like. And there, they create and recreate myths for each other, especially through their favourite game, "playing Flash Gordon". More than a mere re-enactment of the famous comic strip, the one they both love the most, it is also a psychological and metaphysical theatre. Vincent alternates between playing the hero Flash Gordon and his scientist sidekick Doctor Zardov, but also some of the beasts and monsters in the series; Erika alternates between being Dale Arden, the heroine, and cruel Princess Aura, one of the villains.

Plucky and vulnerable and cold and merciless by turns, in her role-plays Erika acts out the turmoil in her soul and her life, a turmoil that is however--and despite conventional psychobabble assumptions--never resolved by this, and in fact possibly exacerbated. She will always be the combustible mixture of vulnerable young heroine and belle dame sans merci, a split in herself which is as dangerous to her as it is to everyone else in whose lives she will wreak havoc.

ERIKA Is an extraordinary character. To my mind, she is the single most arresting female character Christopher Koch has yet created. Complex and interesting in her own right, she Is also a kind of culmination and distillation of many of his novels' fascinating women: bewitching Deirdre Dillon in The Doubleman, the closest to the hollow-hearted Elf Queen of any of them, as well as Katrin Vilde in the same novel; lovely Ly Keang and "dragon lady" Claudine Phan in Highways to a War; fairylike, vulnerable Kathleen in Out of Ireland; ambiguous Russian spy Vera Chostiakoy in The Year of Living Dangerously; and of course Jill Bryant, from the same novel. Jill Bryant in particular shares some uncanny similarities with Erika: both beautiful, blond and blue-eyed, they both have a flatmate called Moira (not the same person) and they both share an unhealthy relationship with their fathers, which is at the heart of their psychological problems. But beside Erika, Jill is only a shadow: almost as if she were herself a rehearsal for the much more full-blooded character who came later.

In most of the other books, it's almost as if there have needed to be two separate characters to express that peculiar combination of vulnerability and ruthlessness, danger and loneliness, which is at the heart of Koch's female characters. In Erika, we get the full thing, the entire mix, and an explosive and haunting mix it is. More strongly than any other before, she really does represent "sakti", the life force, electric, ambivalent sexual energy, which is at the core of Koch's female characters, the ambivalence that can be creative and destructive, all at once, like the Hindu goddess Kali/Durga. But Erika is also heartbreakingly--and infuriatingly!--human, and one becomes completely engrossed in her story.

For me, Erika soon began to dominate the novel. Vincent, who in his erratic brilliance, romantic idealism and strange asexuality, somewhat resembles Billy Kwan in The Year of Living Dangerously, gambles, like Kwan, on one grand but futile gesture which backfires. Vincent then slides into the underworld of the memory room, and a long, slow decline; but from then on, Erika emerges more and more strongly: sometimes infuriating, sometimes tiresome, sometimes pitiable, sometimes exciting, fascinating.

Erika is amazingly shrewd and pragmatic at times, even calculating; and then wild, uncontrolled, full of frightening rage and sorrow. She is also what used to be called "fey", but in a kind of modern, half-baked sort of way. At one stage in their hectic affair, she gives Bradley an impromptu Tarot reading (she is fascinated by the Tarot, as by all things hermetic and secret), and tells him that whilst Vincent's guiding card is the Magician--"sometimes a trickster, but really a teacher: a guide to the mysteries", and Bradley's is the Fool--"a jester, but also the Green Man, full of hope", hers is the Star, the naked Goddess, the female principle. She says it with a "special little smile", and goes on to say how she knows she's the Star because of a repeating dream, where she is lying naked on a bed with lots of people looking down at her. It seems to be just Erika's narcissism and self-delusion speaking; but it is more than that, as the reader discovers later. Still, it is typical of Erika, a combination of codswallop and genuine insight.

Like Vincent, in a way Erika is a creature out of time, though she appears more modern than he is. In an earlier age, she may not have been as wild and desperate. She may have found real spiritual succour for her deep psychic wound and the existential hunger, the "God-shaped hole" which causes her to be so destructive. But it is her fate to have been born as a deracinated child of the modern age, in a "second-hand" place like Tasmania, where, as Christopher Koch says in his 1987 essay "The Lost Hemisphere", there can be a feeling of stage set, of giant mirror, of shadow-play mimicking the lost look of England--much as he himself loves it and is nourished by it.

Erika's damaged core is not strong enough to overcome that challenge and make herself whole. In her desperate search for meaning and love, she is running after something she ultimately cannot have. When her wild, passionate love affair with Russian TASS correspondent, and suspected spy, Peter Rykov, careers into a dangerous course, she reverts to the lost and betrayed child she ultimately is--even though by then she is also a nationally acclaimed, enormously famous television presenter. Not all the worldly rewards, not all the tasting of every forbidden fruit, not even all the Secret Rooms, can come close to healing that terrible wound.

ONE OF THE PARTICULAR pleasures of all Christopher Koch's novels, as well as the rich, imaginative and beautiful detailing of narrative and character, is the sensuously evoked settings. In The Memory Room, Tasmania, China and Canberra spring lyrically to life, seen with a poet's clear, deep-seeing eye. And within that poetic evocation of landscape and the natural world is something else that is common to all Koch novels. At the heart of them is the visionary's quest. The Quest for the Holy Grail, you might say: oneness with the immanent and transcendent God, a humble and full opening of the human heart to the wondrous glory and beauty and love and perfect understanding that is the sacred Presence, centre of the universe.

Many of the characters in his novels are questers of one sort or another. All of them are looking for the Grail, for the Otherworld; but just like King Arthur's knights, most of them are flawed and looking in the wrong direction. Beginning with The Boys in the Island, Koch's first novel, there is a distinction made between the true visionary spirit and the "second-hand" experience of ersatz spirituality. The Otherworld, green heart of human longing, fed by the silver streams of Paradise, is always there, dimly apprehended but tantalisingly out of reach. Characters may be given fleeting glimpses of it, usually in a moment of ecstatic communion within that numinously apprehended natural world; or they may fleetingly also glimpse its workings in a human being, someone who may embody for them what things could be like (a notable example of this being the Franciscan in The Doubleman). But often, driven by the thirst for beauty and love and understanding, but also by spiritual laziness and arrogance, they head off to more superficially attractive Otherworlds: Gnosticism, the Tarot, versions of fairyland, secrecy, fantasies of the past ...

There is no moralising in Koch's novels; his writing is always compassionate, and he never preaches. But it is clear nevertheless that the "country of second-hand" is primarily a state of soul, and those caught in its perilous enchantment often learn of its dangers too late. There will always be false knights, tempters, and whimsical, dangerous elf-folk along the road, to waylay you and lead you not to enlightenment and serenity, but to madness and ruin. This was made most explicit in The Doubleman, but is also a strong element of The Memory Room.

In The Memory Room, the Otherworld which Erika and Vincent colonise as youngsters is the comic-book universe of superheroes like Flash Gordon, the Phantom, and so on, flimsy pop-culture reflections of genuine mythical heroes like Cuchulain or Herakles or Odin or Arjuna. Yet despite, or maybe even because of, their very flimsiness, they awaken all kinds of longings in adolescent hearts.

The thing though is not to stay in eternal adolescence, like Erika or Vincent (though we get the strong feeling by the end of the book that his suffering is slowly piecing together the beginning of a deeper understanding for him); but to become whole. Not by casting off childhood altogether, not shutting its myth kingdom up forever, or locking the memory room away--for there lies the way straight to the Wasteland--but understanding it is only part of the story. Growing from it, not staying trapped in its lost, seductive shimmer. That is what Derek Bradley does, like Richard Miller in The Doubleman, and in the end, perhaps there is an argument that this makes him the true hero of this grand, engrossing, magnificent novel. And yet ...

On the cover of The Memory Room, there is a reproduction of Edward Hopper's painting Sun in an Empty Room. The room is empty--and yet it is not, for the sunlight is there. Sunlight--and shadow. Twinned with each other, inescapable from each other. Like Erika and Vincent. It is their memory that haunts the reader; their long struggle, and their strange, doomed, otherworldly love, that remains.

Sophie Masson's latest novel is The Maharajah's Ghost (Random House Australia).