Fiction: We Are Now Beginning Our Descent By James Meek Canongate, 295pp. £16.99 'I want to make some money. I want to be popular before I die. You're thinking I've sold my soul. Have you seen my soul recently?"
Divorced, impoverished, and utterly disillusioned, 37-year-old journalist Adam Kellas finds himself in a hotel room in Afghanistan. With little passion for the war he is reporting, he spends his time churning out a clichéd thriller. What will follow is a Dante-esque descent into a moral hell that will take him from the remote villages of the Middle East to the cold of an American winter as he strives to re-connect with the world around him.
James Meek's We Are Now Beginning Our Descentis a tale of personal redemption as well as an ambitious exploration of the contemporary political scene. Just as Kellas's brief relationship with enigmatic American journalist Astrid will lead him to abandon everything in favour of a journey of self-discovery on the other side of the world, so too will Meek challenge his readers to forego their own preconceptions of Afghanistan and of the West's involvement there. As the author makes clear, this is a world bereft of easy certainties, and though Kellas is horrified at Astrid's decision to carry a gun - because he believes it makes her complicit in the conflict - he is later forced to ask: "If you stand by while somebody else kills some strangers in the distance, are you in on the killing yourself?"
A JOURNALIST OF some 20 years standing, Meek has reported from both Afghanistan and Iraq, and is clearly at home with the realities of life in a combat zone. Fights erupt over everything from sleeping quarters to spare batteries, and combat fatigue leads one journalist to remark - "I've had enough. I've been to too many strangers' funerals in places like this. I want stories where I can be home for supper. I want stories I can wear cardigans to." However Meek grounds his tale in an Afghanistan in which it is the journalists and the Western armies - not the inhabitants - who should be regarded as "the Other". As Kellas remarks of the US planes that wipe out a village from the air: "America reached out for thousands of miles and its sense of touch stopped three miles short." Yet this is no idealistic portrayal. No-one is absolved of blame, and Meek continually reminds his readers of the imperatives which send journalists to combat zones. When Kellas remarks, "My newspaper doesn't give me the space to write that it's beautiful here," Astrid reminds him that "the people who read it wouldn't be happy if it did".
Unlike Kellas, whose dreams of commercial literary success come to nothing, Meek made his name with his 2005 bestseller, The People's Act of Love. Though set in Siberia during the Russian Revolution - rather than contemporary Afghanistan or America - his earlier work shares many of his latest's preoccupations, not least a belief in love as an agent of hope and repair. Ultimately it will be this belief, not ambition or greed, that will motivate Kellas to travel to America on the strength of a single email from Astrid. The woman he finds there is a far cry from the one he had imagined, but finally he is able to bridge the gap between perception and reality, and it is only through doing so, Meek implies, that any of us can achieve redemption.
THIS IS AN ambitious work that - on occasion - falls short of the standards of clarity and insight that it demands of its own protagonists, but Meek is both skilful and subtle enough to overcome such imperfections and has created not just an entertaining novel, but a valuable comment on some of the most contentious issues of our time.
"A river was to be known by its course," Kellas concludes, and just as he and Astrid can change, so too can the relationship between Europe, America and the rest of the world that they have symbolised. It is to this end that the pair accept another foreign assignment - this time in Iraq - "to get away from the idealising and the demonising". As they drive off towards Basra, the uncertainty of their fate is suddenly imbued with hope and possibility.
Freya McClements is a writer and journalist
