Lost Voices

by Christopher J. Koch

Overview

Twice winner of the Miles Franklin Award and an Officer of the Order of Australia for his contribution to Australian literature, Christopher Koch returns with Lost Voices, a remarkable new novel that confirms him as one of our most significant and compelling novelists.
Twice winner of the Miles Franklin Award, Christopher Koch returns with a remarkable novel of gripping narrative power. Young Hugh Dixon believes he can save his father from ruin if he asks his estranged great-uncle Walter- a wealthy lawyer who lives alone in a tasmanian farmhouse passed down through the family-for help. As he is drawn into Walter's rarefied world, Hugh discovers that both his uncle and the farmhouse are links to a notorious episode in the mid nineteenth century. Walter's father, Martin, was living in the house when it was raided by members of an outlaw community run by Lucas Wilson, a charismatic ex-soldier attempting to build a utopia. But like later societies with communitarian ideals, Nowhere Valley was controlled by the gun, with Wilson as benevolent dictator. twenty-year-old Martin's sojourn in the Valley as Wilson's disciple has become an obsession with Walter Dixon: one which haunts his present and keeps the past tantalizingly close. As Walter encourages Hugh's ambition to become an artist, and again comes to his aid when one of Hugh's friends is charged with murder, the way life's patterns repeat themselves from one generation to another becomes eerily apparent. Dramatic, insightful and evocative, Lost Voices is an intriguing double narrative that confirms Koch as one of our most significant and compelling novelists.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780730499510
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/01/2012
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	476
File size:	491 KB

About the Author

Christopher Koch was born and educated in Tasmania. Most of his life has been spent in Sydney, where he worked for some years as a radio producer in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. He has been a full-time writer since 1972, winning international praise and a number of awards for his novels. One of his novels, The Year of Living Dangerously, was made into a film by Peter Weir. Koch has twice won the Miles Franklin Award for fiction: for The Doubleman and Highways to a War. In 1995 he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for his contribution to Australian literature.

Read an Excerpt

Lost Voices

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By Christopher Koch

HarperCollins Publishers

Copyright © 2014 Christopher Koch
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7322-9463-2

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1
Late in life, I've come to the view that everything in our lives
is part of a pre-ordained pattern. Unfortunately it's a pattern to
which we're not given a key. It contains our joys and miseries; our
good actions and our crimes; our strivings and defeats. Certain
links in this pattern connect the present to the past. These form
the lattice of history, both personal and public; and this is why
the past refuses to be dismissed. It waits to involve us in new
variations; and its dead wait for their time to reappear.
God or destiny (whichever you prefer) drops each of us into
a location and a time whose meaning we either inherit without
thought, or else must struggle to discover. I was given the second
kind: an island state on the southernmost rim of the British
Empire, minding its own business and remote from the main
roads of history. I left it in early adulthood; now I've come home
on a visit, and I fi nd myself moving through a series of vignettes
from my earliest years. Yesterday, I walked through the suburb
where my life began.
A bright, still morning in Tower Road. All very much how it
used to be, over fi fty years ago. Silence, except for an occasional

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passing car. A woman weeding a fl ower bed by her gate. The
small prim houses from 1910 and 1928 and 1935 still hiding
their secrets, behind tight front porches and lead-light windows.
A sense of waiting, and a wide, wide emptiness, under an
overwhelming sky. All how it used to be, bringing back that
vast desolation and yearning that had baffl ed me as a child, and
which I found baffl ed me still.
Here was the little bridge that carried Tower Road across the
railway cutting: the bridge I'd haunted as a boy. The train tracks
were running as always between high, steep banks where the sun
lay in dozing yellow patches, and ranks of wild fennel grew. On
top of the bank on the western side, the old rambling house with
the green roof was still there, the ash tree still in its garden. Still
there as well, running north above the cutting, the rickety line of
paling fences that hid the little mysteries of back gardens. Over
on the eastern side stood the sinister building I once knew as The
Orphanage, its sombre brick turrets unchanged. Far off, houses
swarmed on a hill on the edge of Moonah, and farther off still,
in the utmost distance, lay the looming, grey-blue ranges where
Wilson and Dalton once rode.
I stood at the centre of the bridge. This was where the now-
extinct steam train would pound through below me as I hung
on the railing, sending out a long, high whistle that saluted the
world, and leaving behind a thrilling reek of coal. When it had
gone, the emptiness and silence would enclose me again under
the intolerably high sky, and I'd be fi lled with a hunger that made
my throat ache. The hunger was for nothing I could identify —
except to say that it was for the world the train had summoned
up, far beyond this suburb that was the only home I knew, here
on the border of the district of Glenorchy.
My parents' house was a little over halfway down Tower Road
before you came to the bridge. Tower Road took its name from
a stone-built, ivy-grown Irish tower-house on the corner of Main
Road which had survived from the 1830s. Otherwise, the street

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was lined with small, decent, solid brick bungalows built between
the Edwardian era and the 1940s, set close together and staring
at each other in silence. Our house was one of these.
It had been built in the 1920s, in the American bungalow style
of that period. It had a central gable over the small front porch,
whose canopy was supported by fat brick pylons. On each side
of the porch were pairs of wooden-framed sash windows, with
lead-lights in their upper sections. There were also lead-lights in
a window in the top half of the front door. These were of stained
glass, and their reds and blues and greens were refl ected on the
walls and polished fl oorboards of the hall. When I was small I
would sometimes linger alone there on late, sunny afternoons,
and the lead-lights and their refl ections would seem part of a
mysterious suspension of Time: a place where everything had
stopped, and where I found myself in a vacuum.
It was pleasant at fi rst, this vacuum. It smelled eternally of fl oor
polish and clean carpet and the fl owers my mother put on the
hall table. But then I would sense in it a gathering expectation:
the imminent arrival of something vast. Yet whatever it was never
seemed to come; and at this, a hollow fear would seize me, and
a feeling of abandonment. I was trapped in the hallway's bland
afternoon, where nothing fi nally happened, and the coloured
lights shimmered on the wall; and I didn't know what to do. I
was only freed by the melodious chiming of the mantel clock in
the sitting-room: a sound that told me that Time was continuing
after all, and that I was free to go: to escape.
This little hallway would eventually be the setting for the fi rst
serious crisis in my life. When it took place, I had the irrational
notion that the hallway had always been waiting for it.
An ordinary Saturday evening in November, 1950: close to the
end of my fi nal year at High School, when I was eighteen. I'd just
arrived home for tea, so it must have been close to six o'clock. I
no longer recall what I'd been doing that day; visiting one of my

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friends, perhaps. I came into the house through the back door
as I always
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Lost Voices by Christopher Koch. Copyright © 2014 Christopher Koch. Excerpted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
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