Customer Reviews

Charlie Johnson in the Flames

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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!

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.

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.

Before you read this book, do not forget that Ignatieff, now a human rights expert, was an appeaser during the period of Bosnia's destruction between 1992 and 1995. To have appeased Milosevic and his supporters, who committed genocide, was a great moral failure. That Ignatieff is now a professor of human rights at Harvard is a joke, particularly to those who care about Bosnia. Please read the following review:

To the Editors:

Michael Ignatieff's essay "The Missed Chance in Bosnia" [NYR, February 29], in which he derides the Clinton administration and those whom he calls "pro-Bosnian Americans" for frustrating David Owen's efforts to bring peace to the Balkans, is startling and mean-spirited. Ignatieff's account of events in the Balkans is highly debatable-he might have noted that the only peace plan that brought a halt to the genocide was preceded by a NATO bombing campaign of the sort that Owen and the Europeans were hoping to avoid-and owes much to an uncritical acceptance of much material from Owen's book.

It is the moral analysis of the conflict that most seems to offend Ignatieff, like Owen. He notes with approval Owen's rejection of American ideas of right and wrong in the war, writing that "the conflict was not a morality play about blameless Muslim victims and evil Serb aggressors; it was a war in which all sides could be criticized."

Two paragraphs later, however, Ignatieff suddenly overcomes his aversion to morality plays and claims that "it is difficult to think of a recent conflict in which there was such moral unanimity in face of evil and so little determination to do anything about it." And where does he find this evil, where is his moral sense offended? In Krajina. For "the strategy that culminated at Dayton came at a price, including a moral one: Tudjman was given the green light to cleanse Croatia of most of its Serbs." It was there that the West lost its honor. Not in Sarajevo, not in Gorazde, not in Srebrenica, not with the two million Muslims driven from their homes.

The Black Book of Bosnia, which I edited, and which Ignatieff dismisses in favor of Owen's approach to the war, is perfectly straightforward in acknowledging and condemning the Croatian crimes in Krajina; and yet Ignatieff is obtuse to suggest that those crimes diminish the gravity of the great crime against Bosnia, or that the crime against Bosnia was not, morally and politically, the main event.

But Ignatieff's most saddening argument is that the Bosnian Muslims, as a matter of policy, shelled their own villages, their own hospitals, their own women and children. "In 1992 and 1993 at least," Ignatieff writes, the Bosnians "knew their chief asset was the suffering of Sarajevo.... As the siege continued, it provided the Bosnian government with a propaganda weapon in its campaign to have the US adopt a 'lift and strike' policy.... The Bosnians grew steadily more adept in exploiting their status as victims." These are remarkable words: the suffering a "chief asset," the siege a "propaganda weapon."

But there is more. Ignatieff concludes that it is the "pro-Bosnian Americans" who are hobbled by moral confusions: "It seems morally odd, in fact, to suppose that a victim must remain blameless in order to continue to deserve assistance." But it is Ignatieff who equates victimhood with saintliness. The fact that there are no good guys in the world does not mean that there are no bad guys. And if some Bosnians provoked some Serbs, surely this does not mean that the misery of hundreds of thousands of innocent victims of Serbian aggression deserves to be reduced to "propaganda."

It is one thing to argue, from the standpoint of Realpolitik, that neither the United States nor any Western country had a compelling national interest to defend in Bosnia. (It is an argument without merit, but that is for another day.) It is quite another thing to claim that the victims of the Bosnian war-overwhelmingly Muslim, overwhelmingly civilian, overwhelmingly women and children-are victims of their own obstinacy, of their own claim to a life as a nation.

Ignatieff poorly characterizes the other side in this debate as "pro-Bosnian Americans." They are, rather, anti-genocide Americans, who are therefore pro-Bosnian. There are also, of course, anti-genocide Europeans. I count myself among them, as no doubt Ignatieff does, too. And yet he wishes to distinguish himself from the pro-Bosnians. But the Balkan war was not "a war in which all sides can be criticized." It was a war in which some sides may be criticized more than others, and for nothing less than genocide. Ignatieff on Bosnia is like the historian of the First World War whom Clemenceau could not imagine, the one who says that Belgium overran Germany. The Bosnians, it turns out, overran themselves.

Nader Mousavizadeh
The New Republic
Washington, D.C.

What ever you do, avoid this book like the plague. The characters are useless and unlikeable, the story boring and pointless and after you read this you wonder why you wasted time reading it! Your time would be better spent watching paint dry. I reccomend this to fans of the books Scrotie McBoogerballs or the Poop Who took a Pee.

This story was a little disjointed, I felt. I never could develop a real feeling for the lead character, he always seemed to me to be a little unfocused on what he was doing, thus so did the story. Not the worst I've read, but not the best either.

The author, a human rights activist, has written this thrilling short novel (179 pages) about Charlie Johnson, a middle-aged American journalist who has worked all the horrific war torn areas of the globe for many years along with his Polish partner-photographer Jacek. We enter the story as the two men are escaping from a house they were hiding in after it is discovered by the opposition, a Serbian commander. A civilian from the house is set on fire, manages to make her way to Charlie and Jacek, and the three are being helicoptered to the military hospital. Her subsequent death changes Charlie profoundly, and his sole mission becomes finding the Serbian commander responsible for her cruel torture and death. A beautifully written, page turning, fascinating look at the inside life of one scarred, battle weary, foreign correspondent and how dealing with brutality and indifference, and the burning of the woman in Serbia in particular, led him to the climax of this story.

The book is well written and raises some moral questions, but is it possible to trust to a narrator (or, for that matter, Ignatieff) who does not know that the border Slovakia-Hungary-Ukraine DOES NOT exist, mainly because one of those countries is thousands of miles away from the other two; or, that Omarska is not even close to the river Drina (Bosnia and Herzegovina); or, that there are NO baroque churches in Central Serbia, etc, etc. Well, and the guy is a Harvard scholar... And, allegedly, he was in the region, too...