The story of ex-soldiers in search of peace,seen through the lens of a traumatised photographerA young British photojournalist called Jonathan arrives in a Vietnamese village in the instant aftermath of a raid by US troops. The scene is arresting and brutal. There’s beauty in the writing but no exaltation: “through that smoke and dust figures milled as senselessly as the smoke, villagers and soldiers and small petrified black pigs like squealing demons at their feet”. Georgina Harding’s novel is the finely tuned work of a writer exceptionally at ease with her craft and a testomony to the power and poetry of clean and disciplined prose. The writing is steeped in feeling, and unhindered by ornamentation as,walking through the ruined village, the photographer takes pictures of the dead, or the landscape,the burning houses. Corpses in a ditch. He sees an American soldier, “seated on the ground with his back to a wall, or his back to all of that”. It’s “the picture he knew he must have. He knew,as if from deep inside himself, the study in the soldier’s eyes”. Harding must surely have been inspired by Don McCullin’s iconic 1968 image of a shell-shocked soldier. “His lens captured every detail: the coating of dust on the soldier’s skin and his fingers, or the contrasting sheen of the gun metal ... the shadow of his helmet that fell across his face above his staring eyes.”The photograph Jonathan takes of the soldier becomes both an encapsulation of his own trauma and,more prosaically, his ticket out of there. Syndicated across the world, and it is the piece of “luck” that allows him to escape Vietnam. Having fled,Jonathan ends up in Tokyo. He sees a fresh start for himself in the city’s modernity. He takes pictures of the anonymous crowds and finds a pleasing invisibility in the impersonal. Automatic doors. Banks of televisions. “Things in this place were so light and hollow, none of them fairly real. He thought he might stay a long time.” He takes a shrimp series of self-portraits which only serve as evidence of how lost he is, and trying on personalities to see which might fit. He meets a girl,Kumiko, and hopes he can be remade. “If he could train his eye, or could he not see a different world?”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com