To be sure, the essay’s domain is far broader than literary criticism; even so, it may be that the only people nowadays with literary ambition in the essay are the critics. And with the steady decline of that literary middleman, the ‘man of letters’, this group is centred still more firmly on the academy. Barely a generation ago a handful of classic essays would be studied at school; today, next to nothing of that survives, even in the universities. The reasons are many and various, but one stands out: in the Victorian period the essay became associated with a small range of grand themes circling around the relation between religion and society. The claims of science, which once made such themes urgent, now make them seem antiquated, if not moribund. Besides, for an essay to hold an audience, not only must the writer have authority but also the idea of the writer must be felt to have weight; and while we have important writers, when it comes to questions of truth few trust the writer over the scientist.

In a more restricted sense, though, the failure of the essay lies with the critics. For while literary criticism supplies us with an array of conflicting ways in which to talk about poems, novels, and plays, it hardly offers a clue to how to read and judge essays, whether they be in literary criticism, cultural commentary, or reminiscence. Any reader can find something to say about Koch’s novel The Year of Living Dangerously, yet many people would be rather less confident in talking about the essays collected together in this volume. And with good reason; after all, how are we to read them? As literature, as criticism, as a series of opinions on various topics, or as something else?

For most readers, a successful writer’s essays have the same kind of appeal as literary autobiography or biography. They promise a glimpse inside the creative mind: standing in lieu of actually talking with the writer, they reveal intentions, motivations, methods; they tell us what makes the writer tick. Almost always a writer’s essays involve a fair amount of preaching to the converted: how many people have bought one or other of Umberto Eco’s collections of essays, often on quite technical issues, simply out of enthusiasm for The Name of the Rose? Admirers of Koch’s fiction will not be disappointed by a lack of personal comment, nor will they find themselves having to come to grips with the subtleties of contemporary semiology or medieval doctrines of nominalism. The book’s title essay is a loosely autobiographical account of Koch’s interest in crossing the gap between Australia and Asia, something that has concerned him since his first novel, Across the Sea Wall.

Autobiography colours the entire collection: we see Koch as a young man eking out a living, in rather Dickensian surroundings, in London; then he is studying in California; and, from time to time, he reflects on his childhood in Tasmania. We also hear Koch considering what it is to be an Australian writer, pondering the novelist’s role in society, discussing some of his favourite authors (Dickens, Fitzgerald, Greene, Tolstoy, Wolfe), and commenting on the nuts and bolts of the writer’s craft.

All this guarantees a wider audience for ‘a novelist’s essays’ (as Koch subtitles the collection) than for a book of scholarly papers. When the eminent American critic Geoffrey Hartman titles a recent selection of his occasional talks and essays Easy Pieces, the distance between gown and town is made all too clear – especially when one finds that these pieces are sometimes far from easy. Little surprise, then, that people will turn to the writer’s essays rather than to the academic’s; here, at least, the reader hopes, is strength and colour. No one reads W.H. Auden on Shakespeare or Joseph Brodsky on Auden to find out the last word on the texts discussed. More likely, people suspect that practising writers are somehow more ‘inward’ with literature than academics, that their ideas are ‘fresher’ and that they can speak directly out of experience. As long as writers are idealised in this way – and that may well be forever – people will listen to what writers have to say, even on topics they know little about.

Not that this is a problem with Koch: he stays within the bounds of personal experience, his prose tending more to the homely than the prophetic or speculative. And while one may find more strength in Hartman, Koch certainly provides a good deal of colour. As an essayist he forgets little he already knows as a novelist, whether in narrative or characterisation. In ‘California Dreaming’, a portrait of Ken Kesey leads into an exploration of the relation between creativity and drug-taking; we then move backwards in time to the drug culture’s literary and social origin: the novels of Hermann Hesse.

The same nexus of concerns is approached from a different angle in ‘Mysteries’; here, though, the values promoted in Castaneda’s fiction are set against the higher artistic and moral worth of Bernanos, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. Throughout, one is aware of Koch’s Christian convictions. Here, for example, is the conclusion of ‘Mysteries’, one of the book’s rare passages of rhetorical flourish:

This is all that a Christian novelist can do, in the end: to salvage joy wherever it’s to be found, among the rubbish and waste and pathetic incongruities of life; and to show as well the results of its displacement; to identify those counterfeits that come to us in its place, whispering their lies of fulfilment, power and love. Such a novelist will tend, in weaving his fantasies, to recall St Augustine’s words, addressed to God: ‘In darkened affections is the true distance from thy face.’

Koch remarks that he grew up in a country ‘where many Victorian values were still preserved in amber’. Yet if these essays resonate with echoes of the grand Victorian theme, Koch (like fellow essayist Les Murray) has more fellow feeling with G.K. Chesterton than Matthew Arnold: his concern is not how to accommodate religion to secular society but how to direct the secular towards a positive revelation of the good.

Luckily, we are spared Chestertonian paradoxes, yet Koch’s solutions are often just as unconvincing. To talk of the Christian revelation today we need a new vocabulary and new formulations which engage with what ‘God’ and ‘Christ’ can mean here and now. We cannot take refuge, as Koch sometimes does, in Victorian moralising and platitudes. The essay on Kesey is marred by a certain pomposity, an insistence upon being decidedly in the right. His answers always seem too simple, too pat, for the questions.

The same holds true of Koch’s views on art. His general point is solid enough, that art must engage at some level with the ‘real world’. No writer or critic can get very far without that presupposition, but nor can it take anyone very far by itself. And when Koch tries to take us further, we end up in a dead end. In one essay we are told the old story of how Po Chü-l ‘used to read his poems to an old washerwoman; and if she didn’t understand them, he rewrote them until she did’. As an incident in one poet’s life it’s a charming story and, if it’s true, Po Chü-l’s poems are a testimony to the woman’s critical insight; yet when Koch adds that ‘This is the norm to which literature must constantly return’ he becomes both naive and sentimental. Never has there been a less attractive model of the relation between writer and critic, where the one slavishly follows the dictates of the other, and where simplicity is forever in danger of being confused with ignorance. It is a recipe for stagnation and reaction, and one can only be thankful that Koch the novelist doesn’t listen very often to Koch the critic.