Across the pond

Had to stop on Page 406 of The Smoke Jumper, the third Nicholas Evans novel which I bought for £2 one on the front at Beer on a rainy day earlier this week. The sadness was drowning me. I had to leave it for a while and come up for air.  I began to drown in Chapter 22, when one of the three main characters, Connor, a war photographer, is at at the launch party for an exhibition of his own photographs in New York. He is just back from covering the atrocities in Rwanda, and he is not enjoying the superficial chatter that fills the spaces in all such parties. Then a young woman reporter from Vanity Fair, who actually knows the work of his heroes, Robert Capa, Don McCullin, Eve Arnold and Henry Cartier-Bresson.

Eloise walks him round the gallery from beginning to end, then asks what he was looking for. He replies, ‘Hope’. She does not agree, and when he presses her, she says: ‘I think you’re looking for a mirror of your own sadness.’

Not at all the kind of emotional experience that I expected when I bought the book. The Smoke Jumper promised a boy’s own adventure story, of young men being parachuted into the Montana forests, risking their lives to chop down trees to halt the advancing fire.  However, Connor and his best friend, Ed, a musician, are sensitive souls, not macho types, and they fall in love with the same woman, like Jules et Jim.

They started smoke jumping as a summer vacation job but by Page 406, they are both deeply involved in their own day jobs. And Ed the musician is married to Julia and they have a seven-year-old daughter,  Amy.  Won’t say more because I don’t want to give away too much of the plot.

What I can say is that the emotional impact on me was heightened by other things I have been doing this week. Thinking about the reporting of the war reporting of the atrocities in Afghanistan, which has hit the headlines this week because of the kidnapping and rescue of the New York Times reporter,  Stephen Farrell.

This incident has provoked a lot of anger, for three reasons.  Farrell was rescued un-injured, but his Afghan translator,  Sultan Munadi, was killed. The Afghans were upset because some felt this was because of double standards on the part of the British troops. Brits were angry because a British soldier, Corporal John Harrison was killed in the operation. And because the New York Times was employing foreigners (Farrell is British) to report the war, rather than Americans.

This war of words, as Martin Bell points out in a column for The Guardian, threatens the ‘old fashioned boots-on-the-ground reporting’ which is necessary if the world is to know the effects of the Allied air strikes. Bell asserts:

‘The truth is that such journalism is no longer possible in war zones. Hence the rise of rooftop journalism, in which sharply dressed reporters address the camera inside fortified compounds.’

I hope he’s wrong. After all, Farrell was doing just what Bell admires. And, not just in our age, but going back to the Crimean War, only a minority of war reporters and photographers took the huge risks of leaving their minders and heading for the battle-ground.

I was reminded of this last week when writing a book chapter about James Cameron, who did such reporting for Picture Post, the Daily Express and the News Chronicle.  Cameron was the opposite of the gung ho reporter. Like the fictional Connor he did what he had to do. Had to do because of his own demons and because he was blessed, or cursed, with a sensitivity to feeling. And perhaps because he was driven to do what he did as a way of dealing with the scarcely bearable tragedies in his personal life, including the death of his first wife in childbirth and the consequences of his father’s alcoholism.

Incidentally, while I was reading  The Smoke Jumper I thought Evas was American, because the dialogue and the characters of  the main characters are so authentic.  In fact he was born in Worcestershire, a cycle ride from my own boyhood home.  But according to his web page he has spent a lot of time in the US. And he is a former journalist. Not, however, in war zones. He spent three years on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle and then moved into television making films for Weekend World about US and Middle East politics.

The Smoke Jumper by Nicholas Evans. Random House, New York, 2001