HOW MANY OF THE legions of reporters who flooded Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, and marvelled at the B-52 contrails by day and the crystalline heavens by night, and bedded down with camels and watched innocents pick over the remains of their bombed homes and eventually drank whisky with their competitors in liberated Kabul/Basra/Baghdad, can have thought: “When this is over, assuming I survive, I'm going to put everything my bloody editors haven't used into a novel. No, really. This time I am. No varnish. No spin. Just raw, tortured, big-selling, gut-wrenching reality. It's going to be the novel of the effing century”?

Hundreds, surely, of whom only a handful will get as far as an ISBN number. But even they may find it galling to read We Are Now Beginning Our Descent. Its author, after all, is one of them. James Meek has shown, for The Guardian and others, that he can out-report more or less anyone from the trenches, including those who take stupid risks in the misplaced hope that a high body count will compensate for unsubtle writing. He has also shone in the entirely separate world of historical fiction, with The People's Act of Love, and now he has gathered together the guilty secrets of the grit'n' satphone set for an intensely flavoured excavation of our times, and made it look easy.

There'll be peer envy, then. But it needn't deter readers from milking this book for its despairing take on war (“an attempt to buy seriousness with other people's blood”) or enjoying it for what lies beneath - a love story that owes everything to the great collision of Osama bin Laden and Bush Jr's foreign policy.

Meek's protagonist is a divorced white male British war correspondent called Adam Kellas, who could easily have been tiresome to spend 295 pages with. For all their scarcity compared with, say, binmen, war correspondents are clichés on legs unless drawn with enormous skill and detailed inside knowledge. Fortunately, Meek has both. He also has the confidence to make full use of the rootless reporter as fictional device: Kellas can be in Kabul, London and New York on consecutive days and not stretch the credulity unduly.

As it happens, work is not what drives Kellas on and off most of the planes and trucks and buses in this story. Love is, and that's his secret. The object of his obsession is a borderline scrawny American feature writer named Astrid, who is shunned by the pack in Afghanistan because she carries a gun. (The gun seems initially to be her secret, but it keeps falling out of her pockets. Her real secret is much darker.)

Meek flirts with cliché in his depictions of Astrid, as he does with Kellas. And there is something familiar about the long set-pieces around a North London dinner table and aboard a transatlantic jumbo that intersperse the exoticism of war. But with the characters, only the silhouettes are familiar; with the settings, only the grid references. The detail is wholly original. The fluency and inventiveness of the prose ranges from merely satisfying to astonishing, and the depth to which Meek penetrates Kellas's screwed-up mind renders his implausible behaviour plausible, even when he's hurling abuse at a Virginia gas station attendant for daring to talk about the weather.

As far as Hollywood is concerned, all (heterosexual) love stories are the same: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. We Are Now Beginning Our Descent follows the first two thirds of this structure, but this is only part of what pulls the reader through it. The effects of successive post-Soviet wars on those who have covered them, competing continuously with each other and jumping almost as continuousy between medieval barbarity and the sybaritic West, are now trickling into the realm of public interest.

Can these people ever re-adjust? What happens to their judgment? Can they fall in love? Meek offers muted answers only. Hollywood would require something a bit more resonant, and Kellas would probably have to save a child or an interpreter in Act III. Otherwise, his beautifully told story is ready to be cast.

We Are Now Beginning Our Descent by James Meek
Canongate, £16.99

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