C. J. Koch began writing poetry, then novels. Koch sees the novel as an evolution of the narrative poem--providing scope yet retaining myth, metaphor, symbolic patterns, and, as he said in "The Novel as Narrative Poem" (Crossing the Gap: A Novelist's Essays, 1987), presenting a "landscape of experience; the full nature of the soul's journey." In this belief he was compared with Patrick White and Randolph Stow and the move away from bush realism. Koch cites Graham Greene and the notion that "writers draw constantly on childhood, even when they are not writing about it." A general thematic concern is with spiritual health in an unpredictable world, in which "devotion to illusion and obsession with the past" lead to psychic ill health. Protagonists experience physical and cultural disinheritance as a consequence of a colonial heritage in which bodies inhabit landscapes out of keeping with the cultural myths that feed...