I am not a big fiction reader.
When I picked up “Crossing the Gap” by C.J.Koch, I was helping out at a Swinburne University event where I relived my youthful student days.
The Book Club was having a book giveaway, donating books to anyone who wanted to take them on. And I picked this book up because it piqued my inner passion as a writer.
I am not familiar with C.J. Koch before that. I haven’t read any of his books, but a brief research showed that he wrote fiction books such as
- The Boys in the Island
- Across the Sea Wall
- The Year of Living Dangerously
- The Doubleman
He was a prominent writer in the 1960s and 1970s, where he, with the perspective of a native Tasmanian and more broadly, an Australian writer, wrote about Asia during that time.
This is the book for writers such as myself, but his writings could inspire people who are on the fence to take the plunge and become one.
Here is my review of the book, how to read it, and what you could get out of it. And if you are thinking of becoming a writer, I do have some advice to doing so.
I think my best advice is just to … read the book.
I would say it’s essentially a sort of autobiography of C.J. Koch in his younger days and his viewpoints and ideologies. If you are expecting an exciting book, this is not it.
There is no action, no deep mystery. This is a book meant for writers on how to use their daily life experiences to write about the world from their point of view.
And how originality could provoke readers to develop a firmer understanding of worlds beyond their own.
There is little continuity between the various chapters as C.J. writes them in sort of an essay style, each addressing specific issues of writing and how his experience shapes his writing throughout his life.
All of the essays are short reads, about 30 pages long each. So, if you get bored with one, feel free to skip ahead to the next one.
For writers, 4.0 out of 5.0. For normal readers, 3.5 out of 5.0.
It’s rare to get a deep look into the philosophy and thought of a writer. Especially one, from the 1960s and 1970s.
Most of the time, when we read fiction, we get a glimpse into the author’s viewpoints and world, but not the true one. After all, they are fiction. But no doubt, some of the author’s experiences will permeate through to their words, what choices, and how they use them.
But C.J. describes in vivid detail the context of his younger days, and how it came to influence his writing later on. His first and second chapter on his travels from Australia to India and ultimately to the United Kingdom, tells one that was still dominantly, a British viewpoint of the world.
He was from Tasmania, Australia but many from there still viewed the UK as the holy grail of a writing career. His travels to India tell of a still-British empire and how even after independence, the Indians find that the ‘white’ people were more ‘culture’ and ‘civilised’ compared to them. I remember vividly his description of how he and one of his friends got on a ‘second-class’ train with the other Indians, where the ‘white people’ were in ‘first-class’. They were dirty, covered in rags, and equally as poor as all the Indians cramped together with them. He described how he fell asleep on one of the elder Indian gentleman’s shoulders, with all of his chickens in cages next to him.
When he arrived in London, he alongside, many of the poorer British lower classes and immigrants, worked for peanuts in the city, all hoping to realise their dreams in the UK of all sorts of artistic endeavours. It was his encounter with a down-to-luck English noble, who worked the same job as him, that pushed C.J. Koch to concentrate on his passion as a writer and to stop putting off his dream.
From then on, he married his wife there and migrated to the U.S. to pursue a serious writing career in the Stanford writing school. He details this in the third chapter “California Dreaming, Hermann Hesse and The Great God Pot”, where he realises the difference he had with writers from the U.S. It is also here that he sees how writing could have such a profound impact on American society with some of the writers from his class, going on to form dangerous cults that went against the social fabric of America in the hippie movements in the 1960s.
But it was the chapter “The Last Novelist” that really bears his thoughts on writers. He talks about the two great writers during that time — F. Scott Fitzgerald and Robert Hemmingway, and how their morals and attitudes shaped him as a writer. He was not shy to say that Robert Hemmingway was a successful writer but an arrogant one, that was unbearable in demeanour and attitude. He heaps praise on F. Scott Fitzgerald whom he thought exemplifies the life of a real writer or more specifically, a novelist. He had helped propel Robert’s career in the beginning, but later on, Robert repeatedly stabbed F. Scott’s back in private meetings with other people and called him a ‘lousy writer’. Meanwhile, F. Scott had nothing but positive words for Robert but suffered from craving attention and acceptance from Robert.
It is his later chapters of “A Tasmanian Tone”, “Mysteries” and “The Novel as Narrative Poem” that are his strongest writings. You see, he advocates that as much as a writer should write about his home town and country, it is experiences going to other places and writing about them that bring people from all over the world close together. C.J. wrote about his career in Indonesia during the Soekarno time, and readers got to see a unique perspective on Indonesian politics through the lens of fiction. But it is with an Australian background that the fiction became more thought-provoking for readers back in Australia and it helped foreign readers understand what’s going on in Indonesia.
Here, he also talks about how writing will still be relevant no matter what era. It was in the 1970s that film was beginning to become an all-encompassing art form that many have said will replace novels and books. It has sound, visuals, acting, and cinematography that is considered ‘superior’ to writing. But a person’s imagination and thoughts all come from the same fundamental source — writing. If anything, writing inspires the reader’s minds to interpret things according to their own, rather than being shoved into a static representation by films.
What You Can Get Out of the Book
Inspiration. Inspiration to write your thoughts down, no matter how bad or uninteresting you think they are in whatever form — novel, poem, article, etc.
All writing, whether good or bad, is subjective and details each own’s experiences of the world. There is no right or wrong when it comes to writing, even if it leads to undesirable consequences. Writing is an art form that is timeless and provokes thoughts and imagination in the readers’ minds.
Knowing where you are from, and where you went, have valuable details and insights that a person from the other side of the world does not know. And writing is a gateway to worlds that we have not seen or experienced.
If you are hesitating in taking the first step in writing, this book is great to read. If you are a writer, this book is more than great to inspire you to keep writing no matter your doubts and other people’s criticism of them.
