Fiction/Lara Marlowe: Because the conflicts they witness dwarf their personal dramas, the tribe of war correspondents are mercifully neglected by psychologists and sociologists.
In Beirut in 1982, in Kuwait City a decade later, in Mogadishu, Belgrade, Kabul and Baghdad, the same few dozen men and women invariably showed up. The old- timers from Vietnam are nearly gone now; Peter Arnett was the only exception, dispensing chocolates and wisdom in the Palestine Hotel last spring. Even veterans of the previous two Gulf wars are thinning out. The new generation is ever ambitious, a trifle foolhardy, compensating for lack of knowledge with bluster and technical prowess.
This is a convivial tribe, united by dedication to "the story". They're inclined to share food, transport, satphones and drink, and are not above back-stabbing competitors when necessary. Television and radio journalists, photographers, magazine and newspaper correspondents are each a sub-species. Outsiders marry into these clans at their peril; the non-journalist spouses, parents, friends and children of returning war correspondents will never "know what it's like". They can listen to the manic chatter and try to fathom silences, but they're locked out of the experiences that bind the tribe together.
So it's unnerving that a Harvard academic, albeit a sometime newspaper commentator, has captured so perfectly the sub-tribe of TV war reporters. Michael Ignatieff's cast of characters - Jacek the wise cameraman, Etta the meticulous office manager, Buddy the "no problem" fixer - are drawn to perfection. The Serbian colonel and "ethnic cleanser" who so effortlessly turns morality on its head in the startling climax of Ignatieff's novel is a distillation of every Serb officer. The TV network bureau in London is 100 per cent accurate. So are the descriptions of Belgrade, down to the prostitutes in the Moskva Hotel and the sinister police station.
Charlie Johnson, the middle-aged TV correspondent of the title, is the least likeable person in the novel, dangerously close to a cliché. One imagines him just like the photograph of Ignatieff on the book jacket: a good head of greying hair, a womaniser's eyes and smile. There are men like Johnson in every war zone. After decades of reporting, "What he had to show for it was an office of his own, where he could shut the door, as well as half a secretary, three awards on his wall and more experience than he knew what to do with. Not understanding it, he had reduced it all to a set of stories told whenever he was drunk or there was a woman he wanted to impress." Yet miraculously, we end up caring what happens to this cheating husband and clumsy father with a taste for hard drink.
A war crime is the turning-point in Johnson's life. A Bosnian woman, whose name he never learns, is doused with gasoline and set alight by a Serb colonel with a cigarette lighter. Johnson burns his hands trying to save her, then plunges into a suicidal mid-life crisis. Nothing in his career has so directly touched him. At first, his self-indulgence is annoying. Then the reader is gripped by Charlie's irrational search for redemption.
On a subtle level, Ignatieff's novel is also about the naïve blundering of Americans. Charlie ought to know better, but he's still tormented by the question "Why?" It is Etta, the Old Europe office manager who loved him, who has the last word: "Whether they understand what they do or not does not matter," she says of the rapists and war criminals. "What matters is that they do it."
Charlie Johnson In the Flames, By Michael Ignatieff, Chatto &Windus,150pp,£12.99.
Lara Marlowe is a Paris-based correspondent for The Irish Times. She has covered wars in the Middle East, Africa, the Balkans and Central Asia