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Title: Charlie Johnson in the Flames by Michael Ignatieff ISBN: 0-8021-1755-4 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.75 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The war in the Balkans and its sorrowful truths. Fine book!
Comment: The author is a war correspondent who has seen it all, especially in the Balkans. And this novel gives him a chance to put some of his experiences into fictional form. The result is a 179-page book that tells a grim and yet realistic story and put me right into the shoes of his main character.
The book centers on one horrible act of violence. Charlie Johnson, a war correspondent not unlike the author, is trying to get a story. He's made a bad judgment though, and a woman who has sheltered him and his crew is put in danger. She's set afire by a cruel officer and Charlie attempts to save her, burning his hands in the process.
Charlie's hands heal but he is tortured by visions of the crime and he vows to find the man who committed the heartless act and kill him.. The rest of the book follows him in this quest and, along the way we get to meet the people in his life. Etta, a woman from his office in England, makes a special trip to help him get through the first bad days. Then his friend Jacek, a Polish cameraman, invites him to his own home for several weeks while he is healing and Charlie gets to experience the domestic bliss of Jacek and his wife, Magda, so different from his own wife Elizabeth. Eventually, he goes home to England, only to realize that he doesn't belong there. Soon, he is on a plane back to the Balkans, this time at his own expense. Now, he's on a manhunt for the killer.
This is quite a story and the writing kept me intrigued. I learned about the way the war affected the journalist and I also got a sense of the Balkans and the difficult lives that the people lead. As the book hurtled to its inevitable conclusion, I was left with a satisfactory story. But I was also saddened by the sorrowful truths that exist in that part of the world. The author is a good writer and, a student of human nature, which he brought into focus against the background of the reality of war in a distant land. Recommended.
Rating: 3
Summary: Hemingway He's Not
Comment: If you are looking for a book that deconstructs the operations and lifestyle of a war correspondent, Ignatieff's "Charlie Johnson in the Flames" will do the job. Ignatieff absorbingly portrays the shady landscape of local "fixers", influence peddlars, flyblown hellholes and innocent bystanders that correspondents traverse to produce award-winning footage.
However, as a novel this book fails. In the simplicity of his storyline, prose and characters, Ignatieff appears to be striving for a Hemingway-esque war novel. I doubt whether even Hemingway could (or would try to) pull this off in today's world-weary climate, but Ignatieff's attempt seems adolescent. His emotionally stunted protagonist, surrounded by an empathetic trio of earth mothers, is worthy of a dimestore spy novel. The prose is clumsy, reading as if the book were translated from Greek using an abridged dictionary. The story arc is that of a bullet, brutally enforcing Ignatieff's "violence breeds violence" message, unencumbered by nuance. Ingnatieff employs metaphor here only as window dressing; it adds little resonance.
"Charlie Johnson in the Flames" disappoints as literature, but has some merit as journalism about journalism.
Rating: 3
Summary: Fiction from an appeaser
Comment: Before you read this book, do not forget that Ignatieff, now a human rights expert, was an appeaser during the period of Bosnia's destruction between 1992 and 1995. To have appeased Milosevic and his supporters, who committed genocide, was a great moral failure. That Ignatieff is now a professor of human rights at Harvard is a joke, particularly to those who care about Bosnia. Please read the following review:
To the Editors:
Michael Ignatieff's essay "The Missed Chance in Bosnia" [NYR, February 29], in which he derides the Clinton administration and those whom he calls "pro-Bosnian Americans" for frustrating David Owen's efforts to bring peace to the Balkans, is startling and mean-spirited. Ignatieff's account of events in the Balkans is highly debatable-he might have noted that the only peace plan that brought a halt to the genocide was preceded by a NATO bombing campaign of the sort that Owen and the Europeans were hoping to avoid-and owes much to an uncritical acceptance of much material from Owen's book.
It is the moral analysis of the conflict that most seems to offend Ignatieff, like Owen. He notes with approval Owen's rejection of American ideas of right and wrong in the war, writing that "the conflict was not a morality play about blameless Muslim victims and evil Serb aggressors; it was a war in which all sides could be criticized."
Two paragraphs later, however, Ignatieff suddenly overcomes his aversion to morality plays and claims that "it is difficult to think of a recent conflict in which there was such moral unanimity in face of evil and so little determination to do anything about it." And where does he find this evil, where is his moral sense offended? In Krajina. For "the strategy that culminated at Dayton came at a price, including a moral one: Tudjman was given the green light to cleanse Croatia of most of its Serbs." It was there that the West lost its honor. Not in Sarajevo, not in Gorazde, not in Srebrenica, not with the two million Muslims driven from their homes.
The Black Book of Bosnia, which I edited, and which Ignatieff dismisses in favor of Owen's approach to the war, is perfectly straightforward in acknowledging and condemning the Croatian crimes in Krajina; and yet Ignatieff is obtuse to suggest that those crimes diminish the gravity of the great crime against Bosnia, or that the crime against Bosnia was not, morally and politically, the main event.
But Ignatieff's most saddening argument is that the Bosnian Muslims, as a matter of policy, shelled their own villages, their own hospitals, their own women and children. "In 1992 and 1993 at least," Ignatieff writes, the Bosnians "knew their chief asset was the suffering of Sarajevo.... As the siege continued, it provided the Bosnian government with a propaganda weapon in its campaign to have the US adopt a 'lift and strike' policy.... The Bosnians grew steadily more adept in exploiting their status as victims." These are remarkable words: the suffering a "chief asset," the siege a "propaganda weapon."
But there is more. Ignatieff concludes that it is the "pro-Bosnian Americans" who are hobbled by moral confusions: "It seems morally odd, in fact, to suppose that a victim must remain blameless in order to continue to deserve assistance." But it is Ignatieff who equates victimhood with saintliness. The fact that there are no good guys in the world does not mean that there are no bad guys. And if some Bosnians provoked some Serbs, surely this does not mean that the misery of hundreds of thousands of innocent victims of Serbian aggression deserves to be reduced to "propaganda."
It is one thing to argue, from the standpoint of Realpolitik, that neither the United States nor any Western country had a compelling national interest to defend in Bosnia. (It is an argument without merit, but that is for another day.) It is quite another thing to claim that the victims of the Bosnian war-overwhelmingly Muslim, overwhelmingly civilian, overwhelmingly women and children-are victims of their own obstinacy, of their own claim to a life as a nation.
Ignatieff poorly characterizes the other side in this debate as "pro-Bosnian Americans." They are, rather, anti-genocide Americans, who are therefore pro-Bosnian. There are also, of course, anti-genocide Europeans. I count myself among them, as no doubt Ignatieff does, too. And yet he wishes to distinguish himself from the pro-Bosnians. But the Balkan war was not "a war in which all sides can be criticized." It was a war in which some sides may be criticized more than others, and for nothing less than genocide. Ignatieff on Bosnia is like the historian of the First World War whom Clemenceau could not imagine, the one who says that Belgium overran Germany. The Bosnians, it turns out, overran themselves.
Nader Mousavizadeh
The New Republic
Washington, D.C.
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