The Memory Room (Christopher Koch, Vintage, $32.95 pb, ISBN 9781741667301, November) ****

In Hobart in the late 1960s, Derek Bradley meets fellow university student Vincent Austin. Austin is slightly older, charismatic and unusually conservative in those radical times. The pair become firm friends. Then one wet winter night, Derek sees Vincent talking to a young woman, and is introduced to Erika Lange. Erika and Vincent have been unusually close friends since childhood, but Vincent has never spoken about her to Derek. As Derek comes to discover, Vincent and Erika both specialise in secrets. The three next meet in Beijing in the 1980s, when they are all posted to Australia’s embassy: one is now a journalist, one a diplomat, and one a spy. The Memory Room is Koch’s first novel in seven years, and it is a compelling read. The book has a studied, at times quite old-fashioned tone; with an elaborate structure that effectively gives it three layers of narration. While the subject of The Memory Room is espionage, and the architecture of the plot broadly that of the political thriller, Koch’s focus is on the human relationships rather than on ‘action’: if this is ‘a spy novel’ it is one far more in the tradition of John le Carré than Matthew Reilly!

Tim Coronel is editor of Bookseller+Publisher

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2007, Thorpe-Bowker