Charlie Johnson in the Flames: A Novel - Hardcover

Ignatieff, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670044318 ISBN 13: 9780670044313

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 2003

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Michael Ignatieff is Carr Professor of Human Rights Policy at Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He is an outstanding literary and cultural commentator, and also a powerful novelist, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1993 for Scar Tissue. He is well known, too, as a presenter and critic on radio and television. His non-fiction books include a biography of Isaiah Berlin, and four books on ethnic war and intervention Blood and Belonging, The Warrior's Honour, Virtual War, and, most recently, Empire Lite: Nation Building in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan.

From The Washington Post:

Michael Ignatieff is a respected historian of ideas, a distinguished human rights activist and scholar, and an accomplished novelist. He currently directs the Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, and his novel Scar Tissue was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1993. (An earlier novel, Asya, was even better.) Charlie Johnson in the Flames is the story of a veteran war correspondent who is transformed from a jaded observer to an inflamed participant by one experience too many of grotesque brutality.

Charlie, an award-winning British television correspondent, is in Kosovo in 1998, covering the fighting between Serb militias and Kosovar guerrillas. (Ignatieff was there in the 1990s as an adviser to the United Nations.) A rumor circulates that some villages the government claims to control are actually held by the rebels. Charlie and Jacek, his photographer, decide to confirm it. It is a matter of no importance, Charlie acknowledges -- presumably the border is constantly shifting -- but it is a "good story." (No one ever says why. We are left to infer that for contemporary journalists, a good story is anything, however unimportant, that no one else has reported yet.) En route, the guide carelessly endangers a couple of civilians, attracting the militia to their house. One of the civilians, a woman, is drenched with gasoline and set on fire while Charlie and his crew watch from hiding, aghast. When the militia leave, the journalists struggle futilely to get her to a hospital in time.

Their footage of all this is sensational. But the murder haunts Charlie more than all the other violence he has witnessed, perhaps because his own crew's foolishness contributed, perhaps because he tried so hard to save the victim. Horrified to the point of obsession, Charlie wrecks his marriage, exasperates his colleagues and walks away from his job.

At last Charlie decides to track down the militia commander, known as the Colonel, who set the woman afire. This is a very dangerous proposition, so he broods a great deal about his motives. "He had witnessed so much in a life of reporting and had done so little . . . he had never saved anyone, and needed to now." But no, "saving wasn't the right word"; he had already tried that and failed. Justice and vengeance were equally beside the point. He simply wanted to confront the murderer, to make him conscious of what he had done heedlessly, so that a sacramental "flame of recognition and shame would jump the gap between one soul and another" -- as the flame of the Colonel's cigarette lighter had leaped across to his victim's gasoline-soaked body.

Eventually Charlie meets the Colonel, who turns out to be, in some ways, much more impressive than Charlie: forceful, articulate and self-possessed. Perhaps (I'm guessing; we are not told nearly enough about the Colonel) this is because, unlike Charlie, he is devoted to something -- however indefensible -- larger than merely "getting the story" or some other variety of careerism. In fact, it is as much the Colonel's scorn for Charlie's unthinking pursuit of the "good story" as his indifference to murder that goads Charlie into a final, self-destructive spasm of rage.

Afterward, Charlie's friends decide that he was an "innocent." That is, "he never lost his surprise at this fact about the world" -- that people do evil. "Why they do it is not an interesting question. What matters is that they do it." Predictably, these are East Europeans speaking. The superiority of melancholy East European disillusionment to idealistic Western innocence seems to me a tired notion, and dubious to begin with. Still, a good novel can breathe life into any idea.

Charlie Johnson is not, however, a good novel. It is hurried and formulaic. Often it reads as though Ignatieff had hastily fleshed out a failed screenplay. Charlie is not exactly a cipher, but he is far from a fully realized character. Without some sense of what his marriage and career were like before, it's impossible to understand or sympathize when he goes to pieces. The other characters, partly excepting the photographer Jacek, are even thinner. Only the Colonel comes, too briefly, to life. Moreover, the writing is routine, some of it not even of workshop quality:

"He lay watching her. The scent of her body was on his skin and in the sheets. With men, like with Jacek, you could tell what they were thinking. But with women, you never knew. . . .

"She lit the candles and then she sat down on a rickety chair and he did too and they watched the two candles, taller than the rest, flicker and burn."

There's plenty of evidence that Michael Ignatieff can write a compelling, perhaps even a brilliant book in any genre whenever he really sets his mind to it. But it's clear he never really set his mind to Charlie Johnson in the Flames.

Reviewed by George Scialabba

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0670044318
• ISBN 13: 9780670044313
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224