The view from the top

Halfway through this book, the veil lifted, and I thought: ‘I see! I see what he’s trying to do!’ Pickering gets his characters, and moves them along, and then, after 150 pages, he manages to convey a really powerful sensation of something; you might call it amorality, or nihilism, or the sense of the pointlessness of it all. For the first 12 chapters, you are walking uphill, and then you get the view. For the hero, there is horror, and a Graham Greene-like sense of things not being what they seem.

Before this moment, it’s a strange set up. I suppose it’s meant to be. Malone, our Greene-ish hero, is an American airman in his late twenties. He’s in Afghanistan, but not with the military — he flies supplies around. He’s married, but his heart’s not in it; his wife keeps trying for a baby, but he never gets her pregnant. His name, Malone, is a bit of a giveaway. At one point, we find out that his parents weren’t very nice, and that he was suicidal. He’s very world-weary. His wife, Kim, is a Christian doctor. They’re only together because she met him just as he was about to throw himself off a cliff.

That’s not the strange bit, though. We first see Malone in a bar, where he meets a beautiful Pakistani woman, dressed up as Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz. This is Fatima, and she has a pet goose, which she drugs with laudanum to calm it. She keeps it on a lead, like a dog, and calls it Toto. Malone falls for this lady immediately, even though, for the reader, alarm bells are ringing. She says she wants to make a video along the lines of The Wizard of Oz, and Malone agrees to take her off in his plane.