The explicit challenge in this hope is bound to unleash a hive of perfervid researchers in academe who have been searching for fresh fields to play the Compare and Contrast Game, but the general reader would be wise to respect Mr Koch’s wishes. The fact is that the revised version is a great deal better than the first version, tauter; less florid, less verbose, and altogether much more entrancing and powerful. This is saying a good deal for it. Kenneth Slessor described the first version as ‘one of the most powerful, most moving and most beautifully written novels produced in Australia in the last five years’. I think I can say that Slessor would be even more impressed with the economy of the writing in this revised version.

Across the Sea Wall tells the story of a young man who, at twenty-three, decides to abandon his fiancée, his safe job in the public service and the prospect of a neat and comfortable suburban life, to sail from ‘boring Australia’ in search of life and adventure.

He hadn’t realised an ocean liner moved at such speed. There was something alarming and remorseless about it: remorseless, the terrific efficiency of the screw, sending the ship ahead with a single, mindless purpose; to reach Genoa, to cover the unthinkable distance of twelve thousand miles: to leave Australia behind.

He had revelled in the fact until now without really knowing what it meant. He was being raced out of his life, out of his past, out of everything he knew and which had made him; being sped away by this thundering machine. And there was no interruption. There was something appalling about that, and he had wanted childishly to say: Not so fast.

A set of connecting cords, little nerve-threads, were stretched between the hidden land mass and himself, tugging with an unexpected pain. And soon to snap.

Many young Australians set out on similar adventures in the 1950s, though few would have had the exalting and yet tormenting experiences of Robert O’Brien. He falls in love with Ilsa, beautiful, mysterious and unknowable, a migrant from Latvia travelling to Singapore. Ilsa sails on from Singapore with O’Brien who never reaches Genoa or his ‘ultimate’ destination, England. Together they travel around India, O’Brien’s passion intensifying as he slowly learns about Ilsa’s past and tries to rationalise it into something more savoury than it really is, until the cataclysmic moment when the truth can no longer be ignored.

The characterisation of Ilsa is not the least of the achievements in this remarkable book, which is as much concerned with unravelling her strange personality as it is with detailing the shattering effect on Robert’s present and future.

She wore a close-fitting, salmon-coloured dress of what appeared to be satin: a sheath that left her shoulders and arms bare. Half-turning, she showed that the expanse of her back was bare to the base of the spine. This, and the colour of the dress, created an illusion of nakedness. But she...stood among them like a statue, ignoring their conversation, so that she gave an impression of nudity, or as though it had been put on her against her will, and she wore it with contempt.

And she was somehow unfashionable, O’Brien thought. She resembled one of those cold-faced, Junoesque women in dim, nineteenth-century paintings in the hallways of old houses. Her hair was now up in a chignon, which added to this effect: a blend of old-fashioned, statuesque handsomeness and something else; something barbaric: she brought the archaic term irresistibly to mind.

Koch is not a prolific writer (The Year of Living Dangerously is his third novel), but he is something of a perfectionist: his two earlier novels have both undergone drastic revision as the mature man pruned both of their youthful excesses. Though no fundamental changes have been made to Across the Sea Wall it has an added intensity and power in this new, revised version which will give those who read the earlier version the impression they are reading a new Koch novel, and will enchant those who come to this work for the first time.