My Life as a Foreign Country
By Brian Turner
(Jonathan Cape 240pp £16.99)

Seamus Heaney once remarked upon the heroes of antiquity that it is ‘not so much their procedures on the page which are influential as the composite image which has been projected of their conduct’. In Men at War, Christopher Coker (Professor of International Relations at the LSE) undertakes an unscrambling of this particular equation, picking over the last 3000 years of warfare in literature to see ‘what fiction tells us about war’s hold on the imagination of young men, and the way it makes – and breaks – them.’

At heart, Men at War does what surveys of this kind should always do: sends you hurrying to (re-)read the many dozens of books the author’s been referring to as, from The Iliad to World War III, via the Napoleonic era, Dresden and Vietnam, he investigates five designated ‘personalities’ – ‘warriors’, ‘heroes’, ‘villains’, ‘survivors’ and ‘victims’ – incorporating examples as diverse as Henry IV and Dr Strangelove, McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and the Flashman novels (I paused at the Master and Commander chapter to re-watch Russell Crowe’s ‘definitive’ performance). Coker is extremely widely read, both on and off the battlefield, and full of acute literary insights, wit, and a tremendous amount of human sympathy. He has an especially frank and generous affinity for the ‘survivor’, the individual against the heartless ‘machine’ – a category that thankfully shed most of its connotations of cowardice in the course of the last century, and during the Vietnam War in particular. The whole thing is delivered in a relaxed, conversational prose, marred only by some astonishingly incompetent proofreading (or lack thereof).

Coker’s belief that most soldiers are aware of their literary lineage, however (that they have read ‘what fiction tells us…’), is a bit of a sticking point. Achilles, for instance, is ‘a man so many soldiers wish to be but also dread they might become’. This is just wrong. Most ‘soldiers’ have never even heard of Achilles, and only a very few would see him as a cautionary character. It is clear, throughout, that Coker must mean ‘officers’ – a rather 19th-Century distinction that I suspect his audience (none of them ‘soldiers’, in any case) would nonetheless take for granted. All the same, since I still don’t buy that Alexander used his Homer for a pillow, the idea of some Para lieutenant in a Sangin platoon-house thumbing through the Catalogue of Ships seems extraordinarily optimistic. For what it’s worth, the only British officer I am sure has read The Iliad is a former student of Professor Coker.

Things appear to be slightly different in the American military, where a considerable number of soldiers – with or without the inverted commas – seem not only to be conversant with military (and other) literature, but frequently to set about producing it themselves. A prime example of this is the prize-winning poet Brian Turner.

On 3 December 2003, Sergeant Turner’s mechanised infantry unit crossed into Iraqi territory: ‘from Herodotus to Xenophon, from Cornelius Ryan to Lieutenant General Harold G Moore – I am aware of a variety of insertion narratives’. Now, in a fine and contemplative prose memoir, guided by the ghosts of his military ancestors, Turner follows the never-ending rumble of war from one brutal manifestation to the next. Through its drone-pilot conceit, surveying the landscapes of Iraq and Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Vietnam, My Life as a Foreign Country becomes a sort of trans-historical hallucination, this war and all the wars before and after exchanging hints of recognition through the cracks in his personal experience.

While Turner will not have been the only soldier who’d joined up because ‘at some point in the life of the hero the hero is supposed to say I swear’, he is surely one of the very few in living memory to have appointed a ‘literary executor’. My Life as a Foreign Country is chock full of allusions not only to the Graeco-Roman Classical tradition (at one point we watch Turner reading Gregory Hays translating Marcus Aurelius quoting The Iliad) but also to the Bhagavad-Gita, Japanese art, Norse mythology and more. During an aside on the history of weapons manufacture, Turner quietly tracks the etymology of ‘vanadium’ – from Vanadís: ‘goddess of love and fertility, battle and death’ – an element in the steel used to make the M4 rifle.

It’s not just the old-timey stuff, either. The Pequot War, Vietnamese funeral rites, the advent of ‘Waterloo Teeth’; and, in a long, updated riff on O’Brien’s ‘The Things They Carried’: ‘the soldiers enter the house with paperbacks in their cargo pockets, Starship Troopers and Black Hawk Down, We Were Soldiers Once and Young.’ Turner himself packs a copy of Iraqi Poetry Today.

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For Literary Review (in a slightly different version)

Buccmaster believes the old gods built the Roman roads and talks about ‘angland’ in a time when much of the population has only just finished being Danish. He has no truck with ‘cyngs’ and does not answer Harald’s call to Hastings. But when ‘geeyome the bastard’ arrives with his punitive taxes and rapacious knights, Buccmaster finds himself inspired to launch a violent rebellion against legal, financial and cultural annihilation.

History will not permit that he succeed, of course, so perhaps it does not much matter that Buccmaster is delusional, cowardly, and generally a disastrous leader. But his political objections are entirely legitimate, not least regarding a people’s access to their native language: ‘all that we is is bean tacan from us’. It has been a long time since Buccmaster’s descendants had cause to view themselves as victims of a conquest, but this remarkable feat of literary sympathy puts us right back in his apocalyptic vision of the end times for ancient England.

Rather more recent British history repeats itself in Randall (Galley Beggar Press 317pp £11), Jonathan Gibbs’s scathing pseudo-memoir of the Young British Artists and the art market under Cool Britannia. In a parallel artiverse where Damien Hirst died in the late 1980s, Ian ‘Randall’ Timkins has taken the London contemporary scene by storm, selling ‘holographs’ to the rich and famous derived from their own used toilet paper. He and his circle hang out in the pubs around Goldsmiths, attend events they ‘affect to despise’ and say profound things like, ‘There’s only two things you can do with art: make it, and buy it.’

Randall and his retinue occupy a milieu that’s equal parts Geoff Dyer and Bret Easton Ellis, and if the overall tone is just a fraction too refined for a City-boy narrator whose idea of culture was once a ‘signed and framed’ poster of Cindy Crawford, it’s a credit to Gibbs’s writing (and the YBAs) that you don’t need to have paid any conscious attention to the art world over the last twenty years for all of this to still feel familiar. If you can only put up with the slightly obnoxious characters, in fact, Randall is ideal for those who already dismiss most contemporary art as just so much Merda d’artista.

Aaron Thier’s The Ghost Apple (Bloomsbury 289pp £16.99) belongs to the more full-blown variety of satire. Tripoli College, a fourth-rate New England liberal arts institution – established for the betterment of ‘Indian Scholiasts’ – has been hit hard by the financial crisis, thanks largely to its overexposure to the company that manufactures Monopoly money. The college forms a new ‘partnership’ with Big Anna® Brands, a snack-food corporation, the ethical commitments of which include ‘the introduction of clean Human Power™ plow technology’ on its Caribbean plantation estates. One of these is the island of St Renard, where Tripoli’s ‘Field Studies Program in Tropical Agriculture’ enables politically engaged students of all creeds and colours to experience life in a Big Anna® republic.

With his merciless spoofing of course-listing gobbledygook and ‘brand history’ bullshit, Thier’s hectic assemblage of prospectuses, slave narratives, ‘Scandal Vulnerability Assessments’ and insane (but basically verbatim) Victorian health advice marks him out as a potential successor to the late lamented Tom Sharpe, and reaches a new high – which is to say low – for the satirical campus novel.

In Deepti Kapoor’s A Bad Character (Jonathan Cape 234pp £14.99) a young woman from Delhi comes into adulthood at the turn of the millennium, amid a human geography of cyber-boom and rampant development but also abysmal poverty, corruption and obsession with the country’s nuclear neighbour. One of a generation of schoolgirls who were told that they would be ‘the future of India’ but still find it unsafe to go out at night without ‘a man and a car or a car and a gun’, she sidesteps her aunt’s incessant attempts to marry her off and begins a turbulent physical relationship with an ‘ugly’ young man with whom she makes eye contact one day in a busy restaurant. He is the first person she has met who lives on his own, and he becomes her guide to parts of the city that have been thus far inaccessible.

Although the story is not exactly a happy one, the boldness of our protagonist is redeeming: in a setting one expects to be peopled with trapped or defeated women, her determination to forge her own genuine, personal experiences (however painful) is important. Kapoor’s prose, though, is a bit over-wrought and self-consciously modernist in places, and her whistle-stop tour of what should be the seamier aspects of the Indian capital occasionally seems to be ticking boxes (‘Lutyens’ Delhi’; ‘monumental grandeur’) for the ‘international’ audience.

In The Scatter Here is Too Great (Jonathan Cape 203pp £14.99), Bilal Tanweer does a better job of maintaining the flavour of something from another culture. Nine interlinked stories – focusing, in threes, on ‘A Writer in the City’, an old communist poet and a young man who steals cars from defaulting bank customers – orbit at various distances around a bomb blast at Cantt Station in central Karachi. In delivering these disparate viewpoints and dimensions of big-city life, Tanweer purposefully encourages an element of narrative opacity and incoherence. But although each individual strand is not without interest, no one section is particularly substantial or rewarding, and the book as a whole struggles to generate much momentum. Ondaatje-esque reflections appear here and there in support of Tanweer’s approach – ‘True stories are fragments. Anything longer is a lie, a fabrication’ – but, bluntly put, this collection could have done with a little more fabricating.

No such complaint could possibly be levelled at Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know (Picador 555pp £16.99). ‘As a child,’ announces one of his Sebaldian co-narrators, ‘I maintained the expectation that obscure and difficult things would be discussed.’ Rahman satisfies that expectation in spades and with considerable control and polish. On one level, this is the story of two boys from different sides of the tracks and, indeed, from different sides of what used to be East and West Pakistan, who meet at Oxford in the late 1980s and then go on to work in high finance until one loses interest, retrains as a human rights lawyer and ends up in Afghanistan.

On another level, this book is a colossal investigation of the difference between seeing and knowing and understanding, taking in geopolitics, the banking crisis, black swans, NGOs, game theory, the British education system, cartography, war, primatology, (post-)imperialism, Christopher Hitchens, carpentry, Glyndebourne, translation, naval pennants, cognitive sciences, literature, black holes and Bath Olivers. Deeply insightful and limitlessly quotable, this is the kind of book every novelist dreams of writing and no first-timer should ever have had the chutzpah to attempt. As Rahman’s own narrator says, somewhat flagrantly: ‘nothing in his account was out of place, nothing extraneous, even if at times it seemed incomplete and obtuse.’

The same cannot be said of Sarah Perry’s After Me Comes the Flood (Serpent’s Tail 232pp £11.99). One drought-ridden summer John Cole shuts up his bookshop, gets lost driving out of London, breaks down and ends up being invited into an unofficial lunatic asylum, the occupants of which, for some reason, believe they were expecting him. He stays a week. Why? He is frustrated, even scared, by his new companions (Perry is good at the tiny details of mistrust and uncertainty); he thinks they are all lying to him; they are. But he doesn’t leave. Is he perhaps there for his own treatment? We are not vouchsafed an explanation.

Thanks to the litter of symbols and portents (think Henry James rewired by Murakami, or Virginia Woolf directing a sequel to The Village), After Me Comes the Flood consistently feels like it’s about to have a lot going for it. But there’s ultimately no pay-off, leaving the impression that it was all just an exercise in atmosphere.

None of that airy ambiguity in Katherine Faw Morris’s Young God (Granta Books 195pp £12.99). When her skeezy mother dies falling into a ‘witch-tit freezing’ river, trailer-park teenager Nikki decides to take control of her life and sets about making something of herself – specifically, a drug dealer. In two hundred short, violent and often unpleasantly sexual pages Nikki goes about her emotionally lobotomised progress, smoking Kool menthol cigarettes (‘the best thing that’s ever been in her mouth’), shaving herself like a porn star and responding to should-be major life events with a perfunctory ‘Oh’.

The basic so-what-ishness of the ending is perhaps unavoidable, given the context. But Morris’s punchy and unwavering style is absolutely of a piece with her unforgiving environment of post-Palahniuk white-trash girl-power – with guns. And fuchsia end-papers.

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For Literary Review

‘We will die, and who will ever understand any of this?’ So asks Colonel Dorrigo Evans, second in command of the Australian Imperial Force’s 2/7th Casualty Clearing Station, slave worker on the Siam–Burma ‘Death Railway’, and redoubtable hero of Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Flanagan’s novel is dedicated to ‘prisoner san byaku san ju go (335)’ – his father, a survivor of the railway (and worse) during the latter half of the Second World War. And it has already become a significant bestseller in his homeland, where it serves, among other things, as another brick in the wall against forgetting.

Colonel Evans, a Tasmanian Army surgeon with a fondness for Tennyson (‘Ulysses’, not coincidentally) is mobilised for war – leaving behind a burgeoning affair with his uncle’s much-younger wife. After stints in Egypt, Syria, and Changi Gaol in Singapore, he winds up in 1943 in thrall to the murderous, ‘Pharaonic’ Burma railway (cf. The Railway Man, Bridge on the River Kwai, et al) – a project that, as the Japanese repeatedly relate, the supposedly advanced Western nations have never even dared to attempt.

The flag-waving Alec Guinness types having all quickly succumbed to cholera, this ‘most conventional of unconventional men’ finds himself in charge of a sub-unit of ‘shitting skeletons’ dressed in nothing more than ‘cock rags and AIF slouch hats’, hacking, drilling, digging and lugging their way north through Siam, belaboured by jungle, disease, tigers, metric measurements and pathologically-obtuse, haiku-reciting Japanese officers (Flanagan’s title is taken from Basho, famously a high point of Japanese cultural sensibility).

They live in an unreal reality – ‘north-north-west of no south’ – and the track they are laying becomes its own existential explanation: ‘the Line’, a meaningless, Euclidian progress into hell. Evans, as both unit leader and prison doctor, is solely responsible for practically every aspect of his dwindling band, his jury-rigged amputations and appendectomies cruelly nullified by the coin-toss nature of daily life on the railway. ‘Darky Gardiner died and there was no point to it at all.’

His men – colourful characters, many of them underage and all of them decades younger than they now appear – do what they can to get by (not all of it heroic): stealing food, memorising Mein Kampf or Mrs Beeton, sketching portraits of the prison officers (seemingly a nod to Ronald Searle; but perhaps that is doing someone a disservice). The literally muscular Christian Tiny Middleton embarks on such a Stakhanovite fuck-you to the Japanese that he endangers the lives of his less-able comrades. It is not, of course, an experience that is intended to be survived.

Their Japanese overseers subsume themselves in the only way that seems to work – to the ‘careless fatalism’ of the universe, or the Imperial will (‘a poem of one word’), or the railway’s progress through the landscape – and one of the greatest merits of the book is its unblinking elucidation of the Japanese point of view, especially where the human rights of their Australian prisoners were concerned. ‘Being prisoner great shame. Great! … Redeem honour building railway for Emperor.’ The Japanese commandant remarks that, for him, surrender would have constituted a capital offence. Army psychiatrists will later counsel the Australians not to talk about their time in South-East Asia.

Flanagan exhibits an almost faultless emotional intelligence (especially for the minutiae of infidelity) and a poet’s appreciation of the unsentimental detail. His prose is studded with dark, gleaming gems (a record needle ‘scratching circles of sand into the night’) which bestow the quiet blessing of veracity on episodes perhaps otherwise too outlandish or too harrowing to be thought real.

These are, by his own admission, experiences – albeit proxy ones – that Richard Flanagan has needed to get off his chest for some time, and The Narrow Road is a big book. Perhaps slightly too big. Its somewhat contrary billing as a ‘love story’ never sits right, and in the slower patches around the middle of the novel – dysfunctional Odyssean resonances notwithstanding – one begins to suspect that the author may have originally had two stories to tell, and allowed an only moderately substantial romantic storyline to piggyback on his war narrative.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is, at the time of writing, on the shortlist for Australia’s Miles Franklin Literary Award – a fitting tribute to the memory, and indeed memories, of Arch Flanagan, the story’s progenitor, who died the day the novel was finished. Just because the world is, relentlessly, ‘what it is’ doesn’t mean it has to lack a certain poetry.

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For Literary Review

‘Nobody wants to do a year in Iraq’, mutters one of the narrators in Phil Klay’s Redeployment, ‘and come back with nothing but stories about the soft-serve ice-cream machine at the embassy cafeteria.’

No kidding. And Klay (rhymes with ‘guy’) will not have been the first soldier, American or otherwise, to return from operations and find that gung-ho anecdotes were frankly expected of him. But a run-down of the opening lines in this debut story-collection – ‘We shot dogs’; ‘In any other vehicle we’d have died’; ‘For a long time I was angry’ – would make for an more-than-acceptable PowerPoint on the diversity of American experience during their nine-year misadventure in Iraq.

Hooked very loosely on Klay’s own 13 months in Anbar Province, as a Marine Public Affairs officer, during the ‘Surge’ of 2007-8, Redeployment progressively gives voice to grunts and morticians, chaplains and Foreign Service officials, as they variously assault bomb-factories, get written up for decorations, stumble upon scenes of torture, wrangle with politicians, and (ever present throughout the project) attempt to deal with the peculiar perturbations of homecoming – which is what, in this context, ‘redeployment’ actually means.

And they tell stories. What Klay’s pieces turn out to be, in the main, are stories about stories. Stories sons hear from their veteran fathers. Hero stories as part of their not so heroic training programme: ‘In boot camp, the DIs teach you Medal of Honor stories.’ Stories made up just to fill in some paperwork. In ‘War Stories’, the protagonists try their best not to tell any stories at all.

The strategy is well-managed, the tactics subtle. Klay is naturally fluent in the distinct registers of military conversation – the salty, the salutary, the inarticulate humanity – but his frames of reference also incorporate the Jesuits, Egyptian poetry and The Wire. He instinctively plays off the rough soldierly humour against the dark realities it has always been intended to deal with, but he approaches the heavier (read ‘predictable’) issues at a cautious angle. An officer in Haditha (‘In Vietnam They Had Whores’) flaps about his troops’ collegial handing round of a ‘pocket-pussy’; a young soldier reflects that if the platoon can’t find the whorehouse they don’t know the city well enough to be there.

‘OIF’ (Operation Iraqi Freedom) is a three-page exercise in the wilful – and often smug – opacity of the military sub-language, and especially its godawful acronyms. You need a dislocated kind of intellect to wind up assessing your personal value in terms of ‘WIA’ vs ‘KIA’ – and a very unusual sensitivity to that environment to compose a story which, for the outsider, is at once completely alienating and yet makes (almost) total sense.

It’s no discredit to his own soldier-turned-author success story that Klay was already a graduate of literature and creative writing before he joined the Marine Corps, or that his Public Affairs role would have consisted substantially of listening to – and indeed shaping – ‘narratives’ on the front lines. He maintains, for the record, that he left for Iraq with no particular writing opportunity in mind. On the evidence of Redeployment, though, it can only have been a matter of time.

Phil Klay has since announced that his follow-up, a novel, is not going to be about war. A pity for military writing. But it’ll be interesting to see what he comes up with instead.

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For Literary Review

‘cunts’ – or variant thereof.*

What do I win?