CHARLIE JOHNSON IN THE FLAMES
by Michael Ignatieff
Chatto £12.99 pp150

Tim Binding and Michael Ignatieff have both decided to concern themselves with the effect of warfare on modern western minds. Binding looks at a group of English suburbanites who find their lives shaken up, directly or indirectly, by the Falklands war; Ignatieff’s hero, an American television journalist, loses his customary jaded indifference when he sees one pointless killing too many in Kosovo.

Much of Binding’s immense and interestingly overcooked saga is set aboard the Canberra during its voyage to the Falklands as a troopship. Suzanne, one of the stewardesses, falls for Henry, a bandsman with the Royal Marines. Suzanne is, as it happens, a neighbour of Henry’s parents, living in Anglefield Road, a cul-de-sac in a western English town, but none of them knows this. They don’t know because, when Henry was small, his mother managed to lose him in the last great London fog and, owing to circumstances of Dickensian improbability, never found him again. He ended up in a Barnardo’s home. Oddly, his best friend from those days, Richard, also lives in the same fateful cul-de-sac but again nobody realises the connection: Richard and Henry haven’t spoken since they collided embarrassingly on Centre Court, in front of a vast television audience, when they were Wimbledon ball boys.

Binding always compares Anglefield Road to a ship on the sea of life, with a “volatile cargo”, “carried by unforeseen currents into deep and unknown waters”. In this it seems to symbolise the country as a whole; and the Anglefield Road scenes tend to be even more doom-laden than the Canberra scenes. People only have to step outdoors and they find this kind of thing: “On the patio outside a crow stood triumphant over some dark tangled remains, its claws planted crisscross on the upturned belly of the broken carcass as it pulled at the spilt entrails with its beak.”

The absurdity is not altogether unintentional. Binding winks at the reader by including elements such as the grotesque masturbating-contest between paras and marines on the Canberra, or the efforts of Freddie, another Anglefielder, to launch a magazine called Lawns and Lawn-Mowing. (“I mean what is England if it isn’t lawns and lawn-mowing?”) But really the book wants to have it both ways, silly and serious.

Eventually, Henry becomes a field medic, as bandsmen do in wartime, and is traumatised by the horrors of battle: “The killings seemed so bizarre, so varied, so musically choreographed, the deaths, too, a multiplicity of balletic turns, sudden pirouettes, fantastical leaps . . . magicians disintegrating before his eyes, turning into soup or slabs of meat . . . ”

Someone has seen Saving Private Ryan once too often. You would never guess that in the capture of Mount Harriet, the battle on which this sequence is based, only one marine and 10 Argentines were killed. Still, the conviction of the telling, the accretion of social detail and the curiosity value of the characters make the novel worth a look.

Ignatieff’s Charlie Johnson in the Flames is far less over-the-top, but the eponymous reporter is finally just as damaged as Henry. So far, he has been “left almost completely untouched by his life. Tired of it, perhaps, but untouched”. Then he and his cameraman, hiding from a Serbian patrol, witness a Kosovar woman being doused in petrol and set alight. He rashly decides to track down the Serbian colonel responsible and question him.

The story is short and simple, and Etta, Charlie’s bureau manager, gives the moral: some people are just cruel. “Whether they understand what they do or not does not matter. Why they do it is not an interesting question. What matters is that they do it.”

This is perhaps a less than startling conclusion; but then Etta was raped in childhood, and survivors of such ordeals often believe that the motivation of the evil-doer is not worth understanding. Ignatieff, currently Carr Professor of Human Rights at Harvard, makes it hard for us to disagree. Charlie’s civilised question “why?” is futile; the colonel simply needs to be stopped and punished. But Ignatieff avoids overt polemic and shows us troubled minds in a haunting, Graham Greene-like atmosphere.

Available at Books Direct prices of £13.59 (Anthem) and £10.39 plus £1.95 p&p on 0870 165 8585

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist