It is all of a time with its particular era, because the late 1970s, or the "true 1970s," themselves reflected that same exhaustion and skepticism towards anything other than the personal in life. The 13 year gap provides that, as does shifting the point of view of the story from Guy Hamilton, the Australian journalist at the middle of it all, to Hamilton's friend and confidante, Cookie. After all, it is told in a semi-nostalgic tone, which is also loaded with the wisdom of age and its accompanying skepticism rather than youthful disillusionment and cynicism.
To tell it solely from that viewpoint would have made it too immediate. Why skillful? Because the setting of the story is 1965 Indonesia, during the last year of Sukarno's dictatorship.
Part of that is brought about through the skillful use of a narrator, "Cookie" (Koch himself). Koch seems to realize he has managed to place his narrative in a unique time. Koch's novel, The Year of Living Dangerously. And right in the middle of them appeared Christopher J. The 1970s, it seems actually existed for but a small span of time, for three or four years from 1975 to 1979. And like the 1920s again, with the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929, the last year of the 1970s slipped back into a renewal of the Cold War leading to the ultimate demise of Communism in Eastern Europe and Russia. Like the 1920s and the aftermath of World War I, the first few years of the 1970s dealt with a lingering war, Vietnam, that had impacted not just the United States and Southeast Asia but the world at large. The preceding and following decades tended to nibble into both the 1920s and 1970s.
In the twentieth century, that is true, I think, for the 1920s and 1970s (and it may become true for the 1990s). Something about a larger number of days, months, and years gives us perspective. We tend to mark the passage of time more in decades than years.
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