The Year of Living Dangerously

The Year of Living Dangerously is a 1978 novel by Christopher Koch in which an Australian journalist, a Chinese-Australian photojournalist and a British diplomat interact in Indonesia in the summer and autumn of 1965. Set primarily in the Indonesian capital city of Jakarta, it also describes a partly fictionalized version of the events leading up to the coup attempt by the Communist Party of Indonesia on September 30, 1965. The novel's title refers to the Italian phrase vivere pericoloso. It is roughly translated into English as "living dangerously". Indonesian President Sukarno used the phrase for the title of his Independence Day speech of 17 August 1945. Plot introduction The novel is narrated by "Cookie", a news agency reporter. Cookie is an older man who acted as a father confessor to many of the characters in the novel, and is telling the story several years after it happened. He is a stand-in for author Christopher Koch, and helps to illuminate the ways in which identity is mediated by other people's perceptions of an individual and by that individual's perception of him or her self. Thematically, the novel explores the ways in which Australians began to conceptualize themselves differently from Europeans in the post-World War II era, and the way Eastern religions such as Shintoism and Buddhism offer new ways to approach old problems. Billy the dwarf's telling of the Indonesian wayang shadow puppet play of the Buddhist legend of Prince Arjun and Princess Skrikandi illustrates the Hindu belief that there is no right or wrong and there are no final answers—one of the ideas raised by Eastern religions.