Voyeur of terror

Published on Saturday 2 February 2008 13:10

JAMES Meek blurs the line between thriller writing, his own experience as a journalist and the horrors of real war.

WE ARE NOW BEGINNING OUR DESCENT

James Meek

Canongate, 16.99

WITHIN the first 20 pages of James Meek's novel following a misanthropic, unlikeable war correspondent in Afghanistan, Britain and America, come the attacks on the Twin Towers. Though it is the event that sets all others – personal and political – in motion, it's a curiously understated moment. What is most interesting is the journalist Adam Kellas's response, which sets the cynical tone of this, Meek's fourth novel.

Kellas, "a man who no longer put faith in talking, or seeing", has sold out and decided to use his experiences to write a preposterous and hopefully bestselling thriller that pits America against Europe. When the attacks happen, Kellas's colleagues "were awed at how hard he seemed to be taking it, as if he knew he had a friend trapped on the high floors. He didn't." In fact, Kellas is registering shock at watching the climax of his thriller actually unfold before his eyes: "It hadn't occurred to Kellas that men might find it easier to sell their thrilling, unlikely narratives to the masses by asking armies of believers to perform them than to vend their imaginations at airport bookstalls in the accepted fashion." In other words, we're now living in a world where the truth has outperformed fiction.

This, then, is Meek's follow-up to the acclaimed The People's Act Of Love, and though it has moments of brilliance, it is not as successful. Meek's book, like Kellas's, is a thriller. Indeed, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent opens with the first three pages of Kellas's novel – in which a group of women in Iran are attacked by American military personnel – and pretty ham-fisted they are too. Meek is obviously having some fun here. Both author and protagonist are Scottish journalists and, like Kellas, Meek reported from Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001 on the war against the Taliban. But Meek's book, obviously, is far superior to the trash that Kellas is peddling.

Actually, Meek's own experience makes the passages on the nature of 21st-century war and its distancing effects on both nation and individual some of the most powerful and incendiary in the book. "America reached out for thousands of miles and its sense of touch stopped three miles short," he says, of pilots flying over Afghanistan. "It threw the bombs, and pulled away again…"

Essentially, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent is a series of cinematic set pieces, from the bourgeois dinner in north London – where complacent liberalism, right-wing ideology and a smashed bust of Lenin are on the menu – to the hostile mountains of Afghanistan and the rural backwaters of the American South. Though some scenes work better than others, using a classic mould to tell a bang up-to-date story is very effective.

The role of the war correspondent is held up for scrutiny too. In a pivotal scene, in which Kellas witnesses a tank firing at two Taliban lorries, killing the people inside, he is forced to consider whether being both present and an outsider affords him responsibility, and indeed culpability in what he sees. Meek doesn't shy away from these difficult questions and his insight is penetrating. However, his proximity to his subject matter may well also be why this novel is afflicted with messiness and ends up more a book stuffed with interesting ideas than one with a satisfying plot.

If there is one, though, it revolves as much around Kellas's lusting after an American journalist, Astrid, as it does the war in Afghanistan, the backdrop to their short-lived romance. A year after they meet, Kellas, back from the war and a jangling mess of self-destruction and anger, is on a flight to New York in response to an e-mail he has received from Astrid.

Astrid, unfortunately, is an opaque character, with a whiff of male fantasy about her. She is a free spirit, a reckless and brilliant journalist who carries a gun and says things such as: "There's only two ways to be neutral in a war. One is not to know about it, and the other is not to care." When Kellas goes to her, the results are surprising but, like this book and the war itself, we know their story is way past the point of a tidy ending. v