The Irish Times
January 20, 2007 Saturday

Fact and fiction in articles of warfare

by Davin O’Dwyer

Reportage: It is amazing how insulated we now are from the realities
of war. As Iraq and the Middle East rage, and conflict in Africa
remains a commonplace, war for us has assumed a fictional quality: we
consume coverage of the real thing in much the same way as we consume
Vietnam movies or second World War novels.

Watching Hitler’s end in Downfall or the execution of Saddam on Sky
News is not so very different, we find – the grand narratives of war
are familiar and easily digested.

Granta magazine’s editor Ian Jack will soon be departing after 12
years and, in Issue 96: War Zones, he addresses that most extreme and
troubling of subjects. Granta’s famous mix of reportage and fiction
offers an excellent juxtaposition of the fictional depictions of
conflict we so readily consume, and the factual accounts that we
approach in much the same way.

So we get Wendell Steavenson’s Victory in Lebanon, a factual account
of her experiences in Lebanon during the summer war. The brief,
savage conflict has already been reduced to end-of-year news summary
fodder in this part of the world, but, while Steavenson’s piece is no
better or worse than the best news reporting from the time, it
nevertheless gains power from its context. Removed from the daily
updates of casualties and political inertia, and sitting alongside
other reflections on war, Victory in Lebanon crystallises the
Israel-Lebanon war in all its grotesque futility, before it faded
away like any other headline.

Another factual essay is Operation Gomorrah, Marione Ingram’s
description of how she escaped the razing of Hamburg with her mother,
and became one of only 100 Jews in the city to survive the war. Her
piece brings searing, phosphorescent colour to a scenario so often
imagined in grainy black-and-white, as she and her mother pick their
way through burning streets and past bleeding victims. The final
line, however, is one of resignation: "Whatever sparks of penitence
smouldered beneath the ashes of the ruined city, the only expressions
of regret I saw or heard in the streets, shops and schools of Hamburg
were laments for the hardships of defeat."

THE FICTION, INCLUDING pieces by John Burnside and the Bangladeshi
writer Tahmima Anam, understandably offers more filtered reflections
on war. Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul, excerpted here, caused
an Orhan Pamuk-style controversy and court case in Turkey last year
for its story of the friendship between two girls, one Turkish, one
Armenian. Marc Slouka’s The Little Museum of History, the tale of a
dimly remembered Czech emigrant who turns out to have been a Gestapo
interpreter during the war, reveals the way in which wartime actions
hang over lives for ever more.

Simon Norfolk’s striking photographs from Scotland initially appear
out of place in a volume on war. Many could be picture postcards,
with glorious sunlight striking calm seas. But the blunt captions
("The ‘Z’ berth for nuclear submarines, off Rothesay, Isle of Bute"),
reveal that Scotland’s barren west coast is home to vast amounts of
British military technology – an RAF Tornado scrapes the clouds, or a
battleship rests on a serene lake. As Ian Jack writes in his
accompanying notes, "The loveliness of the changing light on sea and
mountain makes it hard to imagine the ominous technology buried
beneath." A photo of a heavily camouflaged soldier is the first human
evidence of military activity, his gun threatening a lakeshore.

Guy Tillim’s images from the Congo are far more conventional in their
portrayal of a country rent by long-term conflict.

AM Homes’s Like an Episode of LA Law ends the collection with a
clever illustration of a domestic conflict. It takes the form of a
list of deposition questions posed to the writer’s biological father,
who had deserted the author and her mother, and gradually illustrates
the scale of his duplicity. Its legal form encapsulates our
"civilised" conflict, but also demonstrates quite how far removed we
are from the realities of warfare. Compared to the brutality visited
on the Lebanese, the Armenians, the Jews of Hamburg, where the scale
of destruction is too huge to imagine and the fever pitch of
irrational hatred too alien to countenance, having a deceitful father
is an all-too-understandable sort of strife.

Davin O’Dwyer is a freelance journalist

Granta 96: War Zones Edited by Ian Jack Granta Publications, 256 pp. £9.99