The Year of Living Dangerously

The Year of Living Dangerously is a novel by the Australian writer Christopher Koch, published in 1978. It follows the events leading up to the attempted coup of September 1965 in Indonesia, and it is told by a news agency reporter nicknamed Cookie.

Cookie is an older man who has spent his career in the region and who serves as a confessor to the people around him. He describes what happens to Guy Hamilton, a foreign correspondent newly arrived in Jakarta and short of experience, to the photographer who becomes his guide to the city, and to the British diplomat whose interests are not the same as either of theirs.

The book takes its title from a phrase used by President Sukarno at a national day speech, roughly translated as living dangerously, and the year in question is one in which political pressure builds steadily. Koch wrote a version of events that mixes real figures and incidents with invented ones, and the novel is at least as interested in what a journalist will do to get a story as in the politics he is reporting.