Charlie Johnson in the Flames [Hardcover]

Michael Ignatieff (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2003

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. As she stumbles, burning, down the road, Charlie dashes from hiding and throws her down, rolling her over and over to extinguish the flames, and burning his hands in the process. Believing the woman's life to have been saved, Charlie is traumatized by her subsequent death. Something in him snaps. He now realizes he has just one ambition left in life: to find the colonel responsible for her death and confront him. Charlie Johnson in the Flames is a major novel by award-winning author Michael Ignatieff, one of the leading political thinkers of our age. A profound meditation on war and guilt, it moves with the pace of a thriller. Indeed, the image of Charlie wrestling with the burning woman might stand as a metaphor for the entire relationship between the West and the rest of the world.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Ignatieff possesses one of the most impressive resumes 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 cliches (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.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

At what cost do journalists bear witness to the worst of life by covering war, genocide, and terrorism? Some are killed or injured, and even those who emerge seemingly unscathed actually sustain deep and indelible emotional, moral, and spiritual scars. Ignatieff, a highly respected political commentator, director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, and a novelist short-listed for the Booker Prize, deftly and devastatingly explores the particular angst of war correspondents in this surgically honed, emotionally scorching, and powerfully resonant tale of a burnt-out British war correspondent. After covering several decades worth of atrocities all around the world, Charles Johnson finally gets sucked into the inferno after the woman who gave him and his Polish photographer shelter on the Kosovan-Serb border is set ablaze by a cold-blooded officer. Her immolation sears Charles' very soul, and Ignatieff masterfully details his hero's self-sacrificing pursuit of the killer, not for revenge but for a "reckoning," the acknowledgment of his crime. Instead, the reckoning is Charles' as he comes face to face with infamy. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Grove/Atlantic (October 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802117554
• ISBN-13: 978-0802117557
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,584,087 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Human Cost of War., October 12, 2003

By 

Michael Murphy (Glasgow, Scotland.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Charlie Johnson in the Flames (Hardcover)

In the collective imagination, the name Kosovo conjures up hellish images of violence, terror, brutality and death. Drawing on his expert knowledge and first-hand experience of war zones, Michael Ignatieff's short novel "Charlie Johnston In The Flames", set during the war in Kosovo, is a moving, disturbing account of one man's agonising experience of the evils of war.

Veteran TV war correspondent, Charlie Johnston, has decades of "holiday from hell" assignments behind him, covering harrowing events in the trouble-spots of the world. Jaded by the carnage he is professionally paid to witness and exposure to all forms of appalling brutality and futile, violent death, Charlie thought he had seen it all: mutilated bodies, burnt-out buildings, fire-gutted villages, sobbing women, wretched orphans - until he sees a vision from hell! Returning from a risky cross-border trip into war-torn Kosovo, he and his cameraman sidekick, Jacek, eyewitness a horrifying atrocity of the kind that marks the moral malaise of our age: a young Kosovar village woman who sheltered them is doused with a jerry-can of gasoline and touched to flame with the flick of the lighter of a militia patrol commander - the commander caught on film by Jacek and later identified as a Serbian army colonel.

Ignatieff shows how the effects of this shock-horror experience can blight the life of even such a battle-hardened war reporter as Charlie. The horror of seeing the young woman burned alive before his eyes - one senseless killing too many - gets to Charlie, penetrates his protective shell of detachment, his gut-reaction being to track down and wreak vengeance on the colonel ... or at least confront him in person about his motivation for the killing.

The theme of revenge resonates through this novel. Charlie himself appears to have ambivalent feelings about the subject: he is painfully aware that the burning compulsion he feels for retribution and revenge - and is powerless to check - is anachronistic and contradictory to his respect for human rights. Yet such is his sense of outrage at the colonel's casual, diabolical act of violence that he feels "an instinct for vengeance can burn through an educated respect for human rights". Like a thriller, the plot creates expectation that there will be a day of reckoning for the colonel in a showdown with the avenging Charlie.

The inspired title, "Charlie Johnston In The Flames", encapsulates all the troubles that afflict Charlie. For Charlie, being "in the flames" takes many shapes and forms: his bandaged hands have been literally engulfed in flames; metaphorically, flames of anger and revenge burn deeply within him; his dreams are haunted by images of the torched village woman; mentally, he is strung up by the weight of the incident pressing on his mind, and from the emotional fall-out of a marriage under pressure. For Charlie Johnston, being "in the flames" can mean many different things - as the dramatic, unexpected denouement of this novel reveals when the moment of truth arrives!

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Hemingway He's Not, February 2, 2004

By 

Annika Listona (west coast, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Charlie Johnson in the Flames (Hardcover)

If you are looking for a book that deconstructs the operations and lifestyle of a war correspondent, Ignatieff's "Charlie Johnson in the Flames" will do the job. Ignatieff absorbingly portrays the shady landscape of local "fixers", influence peddlars, flyblown hellholes and innocent bystanders that correspondents traverse to produce award-winning footage.

However, as a novel this book fails. In the simplicity of his storyline, prose and characters, Ignatieff appears to be striving for a Hemingway-esque war novel. I doubt whether even Hemingway could (or would try to) pull this off in today's world-weary climate, but Ignatieff's attempt seems adolescent. His emotionally stunted protagonist, surrounded by an empathetic trio of earth mothers, is worthy of a dimestore spy novel. The prose is clumsy, reading as if the book were translated from Greek using an abridged dictionary. The story arc is that of a bullet, brutally enforcing Ignatieff's "violence breeds violence" message, unencumbered by nuance. Ingnatieff employs metaphor here only as window dressing; it adds little resonance.

"Charlie Johnson in the Flames" disappoints as literature, but has some merit as journalism about journalism.

8 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The war in the Balkans and its sorrowful truths. Fine book!, March 23, 2004

By 

Linda Linguvic (New York City) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Charlie Johnson in the Flames (Hardcover)

The author is a war correspondent who has seen it all, especially in the Balkans. And this novel gives him a chance to put some of his experiences into fictional form. The result is a 179-page book that tells a grim and yet realistic story and put me right into the shoes of his main character.

The book centers on one horrible act of violence. Charlie Johnson, a war correspondent not unlike the author, is trying to get a story. He's made a bad judgment though, and a woman who has sheltered him and his crew is put in danger. She's set afire by a cruel officer and Charlie attempts to save her, burning his hands in the process.

Charlie's hands heal but he is tortured by visions of the crime and he vows to find the man who committed the heartless act and kill him.. The rest of the book follows him in this quest and, along the way we get to meet the people in his life. Etta, a woman from his office in England, makes a special trip to help him get through the first bad days. Then his friend Jacek, a Polish cameraman, invites him to his own home for several weeks while he is healing and Charlie gets to experience the domestic bliss of Jacek and his wife, Magda, so different from his own wife Elizabeth. Eventually, he goes home to England, only to realize that he doesn't belong there. Soon, he is on a plane back to the Balkans, this time at his own expense. Now, he's on a manhunt for the killer.

This is quite a story and the writing kept me intrigued. I learned about the way the war affected the journalist and I also got a sense of the Balkans and the difficult lives that the people lead. As the book hurtled to its inevitable conclusion, I was left with a satisfactory story. But I was also saddened by the sorrowful truths that exist in that part of the world. The author is a good writer and, a student of human nature, which he brought into focus against the background of the reality of war in a distant land. Recommended.