We Are Now Beginning Our Descent: A Novel (Hardcover)

by James Meek (Author) "At four a.m., when it was still dark and an hour before the Fajr prayer, Sarina Najafi got up, washed, dressed, ate a hasty breakfast..." (more)
Key Phrases: shalwar kameez, aircraft shelters, New York, Shahrukh Khan, The Citizen (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
The author of The People's Act of Love returns with the midlife deconstruction of a reluctant war correspondent working in post-9/11 Afghanistan. What Scots journalist Adam Kellas truly wants is to be a bestselling novelist, but he watches aghast on 9/11 as the planned climax of his latest thriller-in-the-works becomes reality in lower Manhattan. Disappointed, he puts down his manuscript, takes an assignment in Afghanistan covering the subsequent war and falls for an American journalist, Astrid, who leads him into a dangerous blurring of the lines between observer and participant. On his return to the U.K., these conflicts boil over when Kellas attends a dinner party with his poet school chum Patrick M'Gurgan. The fallout—combined with a large advance offered on his next thriller (an imagined war between America and Europe)—leads Kellas on a wild journey to see Astrid, who's living near Chesapeake Bay. Meek's novel exhibits some irritating tendencies—a muddled narrative line, a romance with a few cloying moments and overindulgent digressions into philosophy—but Kellas's unraveling is deliciously enjoyable, and Meek's crafting of character and setting is often masterful. The result is a book that demands much patience from the reader, but delivers rewards in return. (May)
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From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Maureen Freely

We like to categorize authors by their countries of origin. But there is a growing number of novelists who are at home everywhere and nowhere. Perhaps by default, they have become the chroniclers of those who live as they do: the diplomats, soldiers, journalists, teachers, security guards, aid workers, engineers, advisers and executives who move back and forth between the developed and the developing worlds, living out of suitcases and asking themselves every time they board a plane where they fit into the larger scheme of things, or if they fit into anything at all.

James Meek knows this rootless life. Born in England, raised in Scotland, he lived in the former Soviet Union for most of the 1990s. The author of the acclaimed novel The People's Act of Love, Meek has been a journalist for two decades, and he writes with an ease that seems to come from years of composing stories under pressure in dismal conditions. In his new novel, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent, he explores the inner life of a foreign correspondent with biting humor and affection.

The main character, Adam Kellas, is a disaffected reporter who works for a London-based newspaper named the Citizen. We first meet him in October 2001. Dispatched to Afghanistan to cover the war, he is struggling to find it. Kellas has a knack for missing the story. The fighter jets pass too high and too fast for him to see. After they bomb a village, it takes Kellas a day to find the wreckage.

Kellas shares a tiny house with a group of Western journalists who are at once too close to the war and too distant from it, still living by the time zones of their employers. The satellite phones don't always work, and when he discovers that he has lost his signal because a young Afghan guard has removed the phone from the chair outside his window, he is possessed by rage.

Astrid Walsh, an American journalist, confronts him about his temper, calling him a bully. This is the opening salvo of what will become a delightfully off-beat romance. But it will be some time before we have the wherewithal to piece together the story. Instead, we fast-forward to December 2002 and the ill-starred journey that forms the backbone of the novel. Kellas is at Heathrow airport, buying a first-class ticket to New York. As he makes his way across the Atlantic, we learn that he has been marooned (without Astrid) in London for a miserable year. He has now burned his bridges, having disgraced himself at an important dinner party, destroying heirlooms, terrorizing the host's children and betraying his best friend. But all is not lost: He has just finished a cynically conceived thriller that will, he hopes, allow him to retire in style. And at long last he has received an e-mail from Astrid, commanding him to come to her at once. And so he does, without luggage or a winter coat.

A lesser writer would play Kellas's misfortunes for laughs, but though Kellas is darkly comic, Meek makes us feel the sting of his desperation, too. And Meek makes no excuses for him. This is not a victim of violence, but a troubled observer from a news industry that packages and sanitizes foreign conflicts for home consumption. Kellas is an overgrown boy whose ambivalence about love has been greatly complicated by the hall of mirrors that is information technology. He can no longer control the direction of his thoughts.

As his plane leaves Heathrow airport for New York, Kellas looks at England through the window, at the "half legible Braille of villages and farms down there," but he is unable to "imagine the people in them." His mind loops back to Afghanistan, where the F-18 pilots would have looked down from the same height. "They could not land. There had always been the distance. America reached out for thousands of miles, and its sense of touch stopped three miles short." As Kellas makes the same journey in reverse, he repeats the error. A journalist, he now realizes, is by definition a merchant of distance. By remaining emotionally detached, he can protect his readers (and himself) from the full weight of the horrors he has witnessed. But in so doing, he has also shut down his heart. If journalism has become a "cult of seeing without knowing and watching without touching," then Kellas is its perfect illustration.

I might be biased: I opened this book while flying low over the west of England, on a plane bound for New York. I was able to look out over the same seas and islands that featured in Kellas's thoughts. I was so gripped by the story that I carried the book open in my hand through passport control and customs. I am full of admiration for Meek's precise and lyrical prose, for his mapping of the political landscapes through which his characters drift and for his evocation of the strange, torn geometries of the life in the global news stream. But what I most treasure in this novel is its generosity. We carry the flaws of the world inside us. But -- however difficult, desperate and demented its manifestations -- there is also love.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Canongate U.S.; First American Edition edition (May 13, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1847671764
• ISBN-13: 978-1847671769
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #440,880 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "The descent to Hades is the same from every place.", May 23, 2008

By	Leonard Fleisig "Len" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Diogenes

A few weeks ago I got into an extended conversation about the life and death of Kevin Carter. Carter was a photojournalist. Carter first made a name for himself in his native South Africa. His photos of life under apartheid were published around the world. His primary claim to fame arose in 1993 when he traveled to war-ravaged Sudan. His photo of an emaciated little girl, struggling to get to a feeding station while a large vulture sat nearby waiting for the girl to die, won him a Pulitzer Prize. It also caused a great deal of controversy as people who were horrified by the picture could not understand why Carter did not act to protect the child or carry her to the feeding station. Six weeks after winning the Pulitzer, Kevin Carter committed suicide. He was 33. Many people made an immediate causal connection between Carter's photograph in Sudan and his suicide. Others argued that Carter's life was far too complicated to attribute his death to one specific cause. In essence, those others asserted that no one event can be explained if we confine ourselves to seeking one cause for every effect. As Italo Calvino has suggested, "every event is like a vortex where various streams converge, each moved by heterogeneous impulses, none of which can be overlooked in the search for the truth."

It was not long after that conversation that I picked up James Meek's "We are Now Beginning our Descent". The connection between Kevin Carter's story and the fictional characters that Meek creates is a powerful one. Adam Kellas is a British journalist. Astrid Walsh is an American journalist. They meet in the Afghan mountains in the months after 9/11. They each arrive in Afghanistan with a couple of suitcases full of emotional baggage. They leave Afghanistan with even more baggage after a chance encounter with some Afghani soldiers has devastating, if unexpected and unintended, consequences. In essence Meek sets up the construct of the ultra-neutral reporter who will observe but never interfere with the action he or she is covering and then creates a situation where that neutrality is or may have been breached.

What Meek has done here is to provide us with a look at the vortex created by the brief meeting of Adam and Astrid. He also provides a look at the `stream' of both Adam and Astrid before and after their meeting. The result is a very entertaining and quite moving look at the lives of two people as they try to come to grips with their lives: with their lives as they existed before Afghanistan and as it exists afterward.

"We are Now Beginning our Descent"is Meeks second novel. I thought his first work, The People's Act of Love was a remarkably good effort and I awaited Meek's second effort with expectation and a bit of trepidation. Second novels are challenging, both for the author and for the reader. The author is challenged to live up to the promise of his/her first work. The reader is challenged by virtue of his/her own heightened expectation and anticipation that the second work will outstrip the qualities of the first novel. Meek has met his challenge with ease. I think this book does live up to the promise of Meek's first book. The book also met this reader's challenge. It met my heightened expectations. L. Fleisig

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A complex character in a complicated world, April 14, 2008

By	Friederike Knabe (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

After the success of The People's Act of Love, expectations for Meek's new novel have been high. In "We Are Beginning Our Descent" Meek demonstrates the best of journalistic and fiction writing as well as some of the weaknesses. Attempting to merge the two styles, his language follows the topic he addresses, thereby losing some of the narrative fluidity and impact. The mostly fast paced story demonstrates his talent for evocative descriptions, whether landscapes, war scenarios or people. Like the author himself, Adam Kellas, the protagonist, is a British correspondent sent to Afghanistan to report the news from there as his audience expects to hear it. It is not necessarily how it is seen on the ground and his frustration with the imposed restrictions is palpable. Meek's experience shines through when he describes, with a mix of irony and empathy, the living conditions of the media contingent hanging out together close to the frontlines. In his downtime Kellas is writing a deliberately provocative political thriller, that he hopes will afford him the means for an easy life in the future. And then he comes across Astrid, a seasoned feature writer from the US who is as aloof as she is beautiful...and an inadvertently provoked action leads to a moral dilemma that will occupy Kellas's mind from then on.

Most of "We are Beginning Our Descent" is written in flashbacks as Kellas ruminates over where he has been and what is in store for him when his plane touches down in New York. The Afghanistan images and the portrayal of the local people he encounters are the most vivid and convey the reality better than many news articles. His character's reflections on his own less than successful life suggest a complex and emotionally charged and restless personality. His relationship to his eclectic circle of friends, in London and in his Scottish home region, is conveyed as essential for his emotional stability. Will it be sufficient to sustain him in the long term? While Meek's well-developed characterization of the diverse personality adds to the breadth of the story, these sections of the book are less powerful than the account from the frontlines. Overall an intriguing and worthwhile read. [Friederike Knabe]

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Men started out looking for love and ended up looking for dignity.", June 28, 2008

By	Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Journalists flock to Afghanistan after 9/11, among them would-be novelist Adam Kellas, thirty-seven, rootless and dispossessed by the terrorists' claim to the great theme of his novel-in-progress. Scribbling a new book in his down time, Kellas fixates on Astrid Walsh, an American journalist who waxes hot and cold, planting the seeds of longing that are so familiar to him, a man unable to totally inhabit his present, eyes ever on the horizon. Adam seeks love, success and a viable self, constantly betrayed by the truth and the disappointment that accompanies his every leap of faith. This interior journey is revealed in flashbacks; Kellas moves from place to place- mindset to mindset- personality reflected in the company he keeps, mirrored by his friends' actions and reactions, a strange brew of impressions that is not clearly defined. The result is a psychological maze; wandering through this emotional incongruence is the protagonist, spectral, existing in moments, forming and reforming his relationship to the world.

In a tenuous, shifting existence, Adam is dependent on others for direction: his best friend, poet Pat M'Gurgan makes a decision to write fantasy, then retreats to his former passion for a finer craft, albeit less remunerative; an American journalist in Afghanistan draws close to Kellas, then disappears, stepping out of his life but never his imagination; Kellas aspires to create a significant novel, only to see his plot stolen by the masterminds of 9/11, unable to recover his equilibrium. The individual who emerges on these pages is an assimilation of images, as though we are piecing together this character from fragments to assemble a whole. Certainly, the most astute observations come from the women Adam has encountered over the years. Juxtaposed against our first meeting with Kellas in Afghanistan post-9/11, his evolution is more perfectly realized in the contretemps with the objects of his desire, yielding trenchant clues to Adam's chronic isolation and the longing he wears like a crown of thorns: "Love. Oh, Adam. You're just not qualified to use the word." Even in Afghanistan, Adam has difficulty fitting in, preoccupied by how he is viewed by others. He is a watcher, a thinker, an intellectual fearful of participation. A dreamer.

Kellas is a competent journalist unable to write the novel that will deliver distinction and respect, a condition that constantly undermines his self-worth. Discontent, yet unable to perform to his own expectations, 9/11 has stolen not only his central theme, but the ability to replace one vision with another. In response, Kellas resorts to dissecting the women on whom he has fixated, demanding from them what is lacking in himself. Projections of desire, they cannot fail to disappoint. European in its angst and perspective, this novel reflects the ambivalence of a world off kilter and a man in search of self, dangerously flailing at his friendships. Yearning to reconfigure himself ("I am going to get away from the idealizing and the demonizing"), Adam turns to his work, this time in that Middle Earth, Iraq, another country in turmoil where he will dwell for a time. For Adam Kellas, unsure whether he is on solid ground or a land mine, "hope and defeat are still in balance." Luan Gaines/ 2008.