Book review: My Gun Was As Tall As Me by Toni Davidson

IT’S GOOD to have Toni Davidson back. He was one of a group of young Scottish authors who emerged around the same time as Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner but never fulfilled their potential.

My Gun Was As Tall As Me

Toni Davidson

Freight, £8.99

Davidson has been quiet for far too long, and this second novel comes a full 13 years ­after his coruscating debut, Scar Culture, an examination of child abuse and psychotherapy that announced the writer’s talent in startling fashion.

Initially, My Gun Was As Tall As Me seems like the product of a different writer, and it is certainly a more mature and considered piece, working on a bigger physical and emotional landscape into the bargain. But then similarities to Davidson’s debut emerge – the horrific subject matter, the meticulous research, the questions of morality in a complex world.

Davidson’s concerns here are twofold. On the one hand the book is about atrocities in Burma and other troubled ­nations across the globe, ­specifically the problem of the recruitment and brainwashing of child soldiers. But ­perhaps even more interesting is the subject of NGO workers trying to help in such circumstances, and the morally ­compromising situations they often find themselves in.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions in this story or as Dominique, a seasoned NGO worker, was told by her father, another veteran NGO employee: “Good intentions surrender to the horror that inevitably unfolds. What is left is commitment.”

The narrative jumps around a cast of disparate characters, but there are two main focal points. Tuvol is the naïve and spoilt son of a great European humanitarian who travels with Dominique to experience the frontline of humanitarian aid for himself. Meanwhile, Lynch and Leer are 11-year-old mute twin boys living in a ­jungle village in Burma ­constantly under threat from corrupt armed forces.

Without giving too much away, events in the jungle mean the villagers have to leave their homes and go on the run. The trauma of this is viscerally portrayed, and ­Davidson does a great job of describing the chaos and ­panic that is an everyday ­occurrence for millions of such people. In NGO jargon they are IDPs, or Internally Displaced People, but Davidson digs under the jargon to the characters underneath.

As he also does with his cast of NGO workers. If the scenes with the Burmese villagers are by necessity more immediate and gripping, the action focussing on Tuvol and Dominique provides the novel’s intellectual meat. How is it possible to function amid such atrocities? How involved should you get with the plight of IDPs? How can you stave off cynicism and breakdown in the face of corruption, ­violence and cruelty?

Thankfully, like any writer worth their salt, Davidson doesn’t try to answer these questions, merely throwing them out there and exposing the complexity of the situation for the reader to witness.

In the hands of a lesser writer this subject matter could easily have been turned into a tub-thumping moral crusade of a book, but it’s to Davidson’s credit that he treats it with depth, vision and compassion.

Edinburgh International Book Festival, tonight, 8.30pm