Charlie Johnson in the Flames
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In his critically acclaimed New York Times Notable Book, Michael Ignatieff tells a story of striking contemporary relevance that has drawn comparisons to the novels of Graham Greene and Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers. Charlie Johnson is an American journalist working for a British news agency somewhere in the Balkans. He believes that over the course of a long career he has seen everything, but suddenly he finds himself more than simply a witness. A woman who has been sheltering Charlie and his crew is doused in gasoline and set on fire by a retreating Serbian colonel. As she stumbles, burning, down the road, Charlie dashes from hiding, throws her down rolling her over and over to extinguish the flames, burning his hands in the process. Believing the woman's life to have been saved, Charlie is traumatized by her death. Something snaps. He now realizes he has just one ambition left in life: to find the colonel and kill him.Publishers WeeklyIgnatieff possesses one of the most impressive r sum s in contemporary letters. A Harvard-based scholar, he writes for an array of high-profile outlets, including the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and has produced well-regarded works of history (Blood and Belonging, etc.), memoir (The Russian Album, etc.) and fiction (Asya and Scar Tissue, shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize). Thus readers may be disappointed by this slight novel, which doesn't make full use of the author's literary powers. Charlie Johnson is a familiar type, a world-weary war correspondent who neglects his family and only feels at home in ravaged countrysides and in the seedy hotel bars that are "someone's idea of an oasis." He's covering yet another armed conflict, somewhere in the former Yugoslavia, when something truly shocking occurs: a woman is set on fire before his eyes. Charlie, feeling responsible for her death, sinks into a depression, leaves his wife and daughter, and hides out on the Polish farm of his cameraman, Jacek. Only one thing is able to rouse Charlie from his convalescence the idea of inflicting serious physical harm on the brutal commander who supervised the burning. He returns to Belgrade and joins up with a "fixer" named Buddy, determined to find the commander no matter what the personal cost. Ignatieff, who has covered his share of nasty conflicts, doesn't glamorize the war journalist's trade but neither does he move beyond the standard clich s (the neglected wife, the nagging boss, the loyal sidekick). This is a readable but standard tale of redemption and revenge, one that would have benefited from the layers of psychological and political insight that Ignatieff brings to the rest of his work. (Oct.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
