Capturing the reality of violence

If you’ve never experienced it, institutionalised violence is incredibly hard to imagine, however strong your power of empathy.

I’ve read I don’t know how many books about war, about civil war, about riots and terror attacks. Like everyone else who follows the news, I’ve seen violently torn bodies that are all that remain of some people’s lives. I read about Kashmir, Manipur, Palestine, Somalia, Rwanda, every day. But still. I don’t think I’ll know exactly what institutionalised violence does unless I experience it myself, which I fervently hope I’ll never have to.

Perhaps that’s why I was so caught in The Gun Room by Georgina Harding, a novel that on first reading seemed so slight, so barely there, that when I finished it, I was convinced I’d missed everything and started reading it again.

But no, I discovered, as I read it the second time in as many days. If it had left me with a feeling of intangibility, of living in a haze of grey, when I’d read it the first time, it was because the details didn’t really matter. Only how I felt as I read it did.

The Gun Room is the story of Jonathan, a freelance photographer who landed in Vietnam at the height of the war, hoping to make a name for himself with pictures of the violence.

He’s young and in a way excited about the manliness of it all: the guns, the helicopters, the guerrillas, the war, being brave, showing the world the truth. And proving, also, perhaps, to his something of a bully older brother Richard that photography is not as wimpy and artsy as Richard believes it is.

But it takes just one helicopter ride courtesy a pilot he’d got drunk with the night before, into a village under attack by US troops, for Jonathan to understand the horror that war really is.

It begins in the helicopter itself when he sees the corpse of a woman splayed out in the fields below. It continues as he leaps off the helicopter when it lands and follows the US troops into the village, seeing bodies around him of innocent people dead, including the woman he saw from the air who still has a sling for a baby around her chest, but with no baby in sight. And it reaches its peak when, rounding a corner, he sees a soldier slumped against the wall, his gun by his side, alive, breathing, but with his eyes dead.

Jonathan is a photographer. A journalist. Whatever he feels, however shell-shocked he is by the reality of violence, he has to take this photograph. It makes him ill, but he presses the shutter again and again and again, moving from one position to another, seeking the best way to tell the story of war. It makes him sick, but he can’t stop himself.

And then he runs back to the helicopter he’d hitched a ride on, and returns to town. Where he knows that unlike other photographers, other journalists, he can never do this again. He will never be able to make his name and career via a war.

So Jonathan runs away. For some reason, he can’t go back home to his mother and brother in England, so he goes to Hong Kong where, to survive, he sells his picture of the soldier which receives great acclaim. And from there he moves to Japan, where he supports himself by teaching English at a language school, and tries to shoot Tokyo in motion for a possible exhibition.

It’s hard for Jonathan to tell his family that he’s in Japan. It’s something to do with his father, but you don’t know what till much further along the story. Though, when Jonathan begins going out with Kumiko, and meets her grandfather who tends to forget everything but his time as a soldier in the jungles of Burma during World War II, it isn’t hard to guess why the thought of Japan will upset Jonathan’s mother. Try as Jonathan might, he just can’t leave war behind.

Life continues for Jonathan in a dream-like haze of post-traumatic stress disorder even though, with Kumiko by his side, it does seem a bit better, a bit less grey.

But then he spots another foreigner in Tokyo. A tall man with a head of blazing blonde hair who seems somehow familiar. So familiar, though Jonathan cannot remember him in any circumstances he can think of, that he follows the man and manages to speak with him, and then understands.

It’s the soldier whose picture he took in Vietnam. The soldier who, now that his face has been seen everywhere as the symbol of the horror of war, cannot, like Jonathan, go back home. And now, slowly, Jonathan’s past begins to overwhelm him. His brother. His father. The knowledge of something terrible that he can never share.

The Gun Room is such a slight book that it’s almost ephemeral. You have the book in your hand. You turn the pages. You feel the paper. But it doesn’t feel real. For a few days after I read the book the second time, I felt just as grey as Jonathan did. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a good thing, but very few books have this effect, so I suppose it must be. If you’re at all hawkish about war, get it at once. Believe me, it’ll change you.

Kushalrani Gulab is a freelance editor and writer who dreams of being a sanyasi by the sea