Characters assume emblematic roles. There is a wise, tutelary dwarf, and another Kaliesque beauty. There are racial types, cultural types, bureaucratic types, even some decent, ordinary ones. Which is always a little awkward in Koch’s fiction, because he wants to use the strategy of archetypes to express something complex about the inner life of individuals, and we can be at a loss as to whether we are encountering a character in his or her own right, or as representative of something other. You always have to keep the possibility of something other in mind.

For in this novel, as in all his others, Koch’s story is not about itself. In the beginning are three young people from Hobart who each enter into a career of information gathering: one as a rising star in ASIS, one in Foreign Affairs, and one as a journalist and press officer. They are all in the business of ferreting out secret or sensitive material. In a sense, this might look like a spy thriller, with a long middle section about covert messages, political manoeuvres and inadequate duplicity in Beijing. But it is no such thing. There is little espionage. The romanticism of that genre is about discovering, holding and withholding information, about playing one’s cards cleverly, holding one’s aces in reserve until the showdown. What we have here is more about the magnetism, for certain natures, of what is concealed, of what is to be deduced from indicative detail. That is, among other things, what makes reading attractive when the writer refuses to explain everything to us. Here, there is nothing like suspense, nothing like a car chase; everything is studied, slow motion.

The central figure, Vincent Austin, is hardly an alluring figure, though in the end the novel seems to have been more about him than about anyone else. He is what we would now call a ‘nerd’: gangly, bespectacled, blue-jawed, strangely impassive or asexual, intense in a somewhat puritanical manner. Ian Fleming has no worries. We are told that Austin is brilliant, but this is not apparent. He holds to views about the importance of tradition, and of beauty as a value in itself, and is so wholly unsympathetic to the dialectic materialism of a not-so-covert Chinese agent as to trigger a reaction against himself, which is hardly the mark of a stellar operative. Nor is his quixotic notion of planning the defection of a venerable classical scholar. Austin has no sense of tact or diplomacy. It is difficult to believe in him as in any way interesting.

The second of the three amigos is an irritating young beauty with an unstable personality. In the Koch world, that is almost a contradiction in terms. Her mood swings are like two sides of a hinged door. There is a real character struggling to get out here, but she is forced back into her archetypal role, and not too far from what Rider Haggard struggled with a century earlier. Her role is to have shared secrets, or beds, and to make telephone calls at unreasonable hours. She is a danger to everyone, including herself, but it is not the sort of danger that tempts you to burn your fingers; and so one cannot really find credible the involvement of the third man in this troika, the diplomat who, again in an apparent contradiction, is engagingly open and accepting of whatever is. He is the good Horatio figure that Koch so often resorts to, the friend who is left to pick up the pieces, sort the papers, interpret the main figure and relay the events to us. He is there at the beginning and the end, which justifies spending time with him in the middle of the story, to the extent of rearranging the balance of interest. By his intervention, views can be advanced, or screened, but in any case separated from the author.

In book after book, Koch has made it clear that his is the narrative of a producer. He presents his material as staged performance, and creates scenes as televisuals: we are directed to see the butts in the ashtray, the hooded desk lamps, the way a character leans into or out of the cone of light. It is like ‘reading’ Bogart, say. The narrative focus seems to be on the lighting, the setting, the furnishing – indicative, certainly, but not where the actual meaning is.

Koch narrates his effects. When he is on his game, he is very good indeed. In some ways, it is what he does best, interpreting place and culture in quick little sketches, like a Japanese or Chinese watercolourist.

Canberra might have a certain tediousness, but it was certainly not ordinary, he decided; when you came to look at it closely, it was extremely strange. Its vistas were those of a particular kind of dream: the sort where one is lost, and searches without hope for release, or perhaps for a reunion with people one cares about – only to find that one must move forever down endless, unfamiliar roads.

His main figures usually stand for some particular set of values, which means that they do not grow or evolve. They are like debaters; they have a position to advance, to argue. Nobody convinces anyone else in situations like that. You might drive the opposition off the field, but you haven’t made any converts. So in this novel, as in his others, opposing ideologies square off. And it is never a simple matter to identify the parties. Not East versus West, for within China vestiges of a great culture are still respected; while the West, for its part, has become decadent. The forces of darkness are everywhere, and only those who attend truly to the life of the inner spirit are positioned to withstand the ongoing assault of fearsome absence, which we call evil.

The pattern of Koch’s thinking has been shaped by the writers he reveres, Dostoevsky, Kipling, Greene and Fitzgerald among them. He has always been ambitious to advance deep issues. They are certainly to be found across the pages of this novel; yet, because such action as there is happens at a remove, the impact of the leading ideas has to be assumed. It is a curious detail that we do not know anything of what is contained in the memory room. When the filing drawers are opened, they are found to have been emptied.