Clemency suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

We Are Now Beginning our Descent

Love among the journalists

James Meek
Canongate, 295pp, £16.99,

John de Falbe

Wednesday, 23rd January 2008

John de Falbe on James Meek's latest book

At the centre of James Meek’s new novel — a fine successor to The People’s Act of Love — there is a brilliant scene in which Adam Kellas, a war correspondent, is watching two Taliban lorries driving along a ridge. In the no-man’s-land between is an ancient Soviet tank occupied by Astrid, an American correspondent with whom Kellas has just spent the night, and an Afghan. She is not concerned with the lorries: she has just challenged the man to hit a tree stump in the distance. Kellas asks the Afghan commander beside him, who is infuriated by the tomfoolery, why he doesn’t instruct the tank to fire at the lorries. The commander replies that he doesn’t want to risk his men ‘when the Americans are going to win the war for us anyway’. Kellas criticises the inadequacy of this response and the commander angrily points out that the lorries may be carrying goods for the Taliban today, but tomorrow they will be ‘carrying goods for us. They’re only drivers.’ The moment seems to have passed, and Kellas dials his mother in Scotland on his satphone. But as they speak about the November leaves in her garden and a peace vigil, he realises with horror that the tank is firing on the lorries after all. The commander has suddenly chosen to interpret Kellas’s criticism as a command. As Kellas’s mother anxiously demands to know what is happening, he tells her ‘there was an accident’ and, later, ‘they were just poor people, Taliban, Mum, people who died just now, unfortunately.’

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment | Apollo Art Books

1 | 2 Next page

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Life and Letters

Allan Massie

Breaking the rules

Brave new writing

Richard Bradford

Fifty years ago, Alan Sillitoe’s first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, changed the history of English fiction. Richard Bradford explains how.