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An Afghan Tale

Sunday, June 28th, 2015

Originally appeared in The Weekly Standard: http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/afghan-tale_978607.html

An Afghan Tale
Reality and unreality at a Combat Outpost.
Ann Marlowe
July 6 – July 13, 2015, Vol. 20, No. 41

The Valley is marketed as a police procedural set in a remote American military outpost in Afghanistan, and it is a page-turner, all 448 of them. It’s also so cunningly constructed that I had to read it twice to be sure I understood everything that was going on—and there are still a few loose ends. But it’s also an ambitious, if reticent, novel about good and evil, friendship and leadership, courage and shame that mainly succeeds.

Like a classic Agatha Christie country-house murder mystery, The Valley has a very limited geographic area and cast of characters. We follow Lieutenant Black—no first name—who’s been sent to a small American combat outpost to conduct a routine investigation: A villager’s house was damaged when an American soldier fired a warning shot in an unruly Afghan crowd, and the village chief complained to a passing civil affairs captain. Lieutenant Black is due to spend a week filling out the paperwork. Meanwhile, he has his own demons: Something has gone very wrong in what should have been a promising Army career, and this is a chance for him to prove himself.

The ramshackle Combat Outpost (COP) Vega—supposed to be the furthest-east, most isolated, and most dangerous American outpost in a Nuristan valley that ends at the Pakistan border—is home to 47 soldiers and one translator, or “terp,” named Danny, the major Afghan character. The men are fighting with not only the Taliban but the villagers, who are also fighting the Taliban. Five days before Black’s arrival, a soldier from Vega fell behind 10 meters on a nighttime patrol and got snatched by locals. His end was gruesome.

In Army-speak, COP Vega is a “self-licking ice cream cone”: an isolated fort so poorly situated that it mainly exists to defend itself rather than to extend American control over terrain or people. Small wonder that the men are half-crazy with stress and treat Black as an enemy. It’s not even so odd that one soldier may be a killer. It is odd, though, that a soldier no one has heard of is listed on the personnel roster, and that another soldier Black meets in the flesh isn’t on the roster.

The U.S. Army doesn’t lose track of soldiers. Or does it?

The Valley draws as much on the conventions of gothic fiction as crime fiction: COP Vega is a castle clinging to a fog-wrapped mountain, surrounded by hostile, poorly understood forces. Black’s trip to COP Vega on a classically pitch-black, rainy night is full of ominous foreshadowing. There’s a joking road sign pointing to “Xanadu,” a cryptic warning to “beware he who would be king.”

The Valley gives the best description of the American military base environment (and the post-9/11 Army) that I’ve ever read, both accurate in the details and evocative in atmosphere. John Renehan nails the big Forward Operating Bases (which are anything but forward) and the tiny, patched-together COPs up in the hills or on dusty plains where the rubber meets the road. He also captures the tensions between noncommissioned officers and junior lieutenants, and between junior enlisted and NCOs. This is all, by extension, a portrait of America today. Consider this:

The room was standard-issue meathead. Heavy-metal posters and jugs of workout powder. An Xbox video game system sat on a shelf beneath a small and beat-up monitor.

Or this description of Lieutenant Pistone, the commander of COP Vega:

He became your squared-away super-soldier, in his own way. Fastidiously organized, diligent about physical training. Not necessarily a good leader. He walked around with the sound track of his freshly awesome life playing in his head. He tended to forget that succeeding in the military was not so much about his own cosmic journey to heroism as it was about how good he was at dealing with people, handling people, taking care of people.

It comes as a shock to read in Renehan’s acknowledgments that the pain-stakingly observed Afghan setting is a work of imagination. Renehan served as an artillery officer in Iraq and has never been to Afghanistan. As this suggests, Renehan is not only a brilliant writer, but a very clever one. Still, there are some first-novel fault lines here: The Valley is written in a close third-person, almost entirely from the point of view of Lieutenant Black. (The couple-dozen pages that take the points of view of other characters are far less successful.) But there’s a major surprise at the end, and the closeness of the narration makes it seem as though the author is pulling a fast one on us.

More seriously, I wish the novelist had opened up his main character more toward the end. He has elegantly avoided all the redemption clichés we might have expected, but the ending feels a bit choked, and The Valley ends on an uncertain note.

Renehan has spoken in an interview of writing a sequel, and I can’t wait; I hope there’s a movie, too. “You are [a] man who needs the truth,” the Afghan terp Danny says to Lieutenant Black. And we need these truths about our wars and our soldiers, too.

Ann Marlowe, a writer in New York, was embedded with the 82nd and 101st airborne divisions in Afghanistan.

Posted in Afghanistan, Music and Cultural Criticism, Perspectival Culture and COIN, US military and COIN, book reviews | Comments Off

King John’s Verdict: the good, the bad, and Magna Carta

Tuesday, May 12th, 2015

(originally published in The Weekly Standard, 18 May 2015) http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/king-john-s-verdict_941051.html#.VVI3dK7nqGQ.twitter

May 18, 2015, Vol. 20, No. 34

In Ivanhoe, Prince John is thoroughly repugnant, displaying “a dissolute audacity, mingled with extreme haughtiness and indifference to the feelings of others,” as well as a “libertine disposition.” According to Stephen Church, Walter Scott’s character is “almost wholly a later concoction”—except, presumably, for the love of fine clothes and jewelry that Scott depicts and Church’s archival evidence proves. The reality revealed here is even rougher.

While Prince John didn’t know what to do about his nephew Arthur, a rival claimant to the English throne, King John, after ascending the throne, contemplated blinding and castrating him—a punishment inflicted by Ottoman sultans upon their younger brothers. Ultimately, the king took the simplest route and had Arthur killed. The newly crowned John repudiated his first wife when a more advantageous alliance with a 12-year-old French heiress presented itself. Later, John incarcerated the wife and son of a rebellious baron and starved them to death.

Governance in John’s administration was as personal and secretive as in Saudi Arabia. It was conducted “by the king himself along with his domestic servants.” Our word “family,” Church explains, derives from the Latin familia, applied to a lord and his retainers, whether or not related by blood. Money, not blood, was at the root of “family.” But John’s kingdom wasn’t a savage backwater: The Angevins took their name from the French province Anjou, the capital of which was Angers. Now a sleepy university town, Angers is best known for its château containing the magnificent 14th-century Apocalypse tapestry. In the 12th century, though, Angers was at the center of the European world.

Church calls this book, in part, “a study in failure,” referring to John’s loss of his father Henry II’s French lands to the French king Philip Augustus. But it’s also a study in long-term success: While these Anglo-French battles would be re-fought in the Hundred Years’ War, John’s loss of territory and retreat to England was decisive for English history—and, indeed, for worldwide governance. His excesses led to Magna Carta (1215), which set the groundwork for Parliament and, eventually, constitutional monarchy.

Much of this lucid, workmanlike history could be ripped from today’s headlines—although in places like Iraq and Libya, not England and France. The unstable, untrusting alliances; the identification of the ruler with the state; the extortion by the ruler of his subjects; the outright sale of state offices; the brutal fighting among members of ruling families—all are the stuff of Third World politics today. How did England move from a culture in which one contemplated blinding and castrating one’s political rivals to the peaceable, money-laundering capital of the world? How did we English-speakers escape this past, and how can others for whom it is the present do so as well?

Church provides some answers. One is that medieval England had good luck. A major condition for stability was the state’s monopoly of force within its borders. The English had this one solved for them by William the Conqueror, who controlled Normandy as well as most of England: “The English king was richer in lands by a margin so great that no mere baron could challenge the king for power.” This isn’t to suggest a very impressive level of security; piracy was a problem at the time, even in the English Channel. But it did put Angevin England ahead of most European societies.

An organized, relatively stable state needs bureaucracy and wealth, and each in turn requires a work ethic and some measure of the rule of law. All of this was present in King John’s England, though still primitive. In fact, John’s reign is the first for which the king’s clerks recorded most of his correspondence. We don’t know why this common-sense measure was adopted at the time, but these documents (called Chancery Rolls) enable historians to reconstruct John’s movements and acts and also attest to a degree of organization. There was enough of a state apparatus that John could identify the lands of those who rebelled against him, as they would toward the end of his reign, and confiscate and redistribute them.

Wealth for most people in Angevin England meant land and agricultural produce; the use of money was still undeveloped. It wasn’t necessary for most of England’s three million people, but it was very necessary for those who would make war, such as the king. England had just one coin, a silver penny, and the total value of all those pennies was only £250,000 in today’s currency. In 1207, John controlled nearly a fifth of England’s wealth, raising £57,000 through an innovative tax called the Thirteenth. Earlier tax farming levied fixed amounts on the barons and landowners, who raised the money from their tenants in chief, who, in turn, raised it from their tenants. While responsibility was at the top, the pain was felt lower down the scale. John, instead, required all landowners, including churchmen, to pay 13 percent of their wealth to the crown, so the levies were not pushed down the social scale. Church believes that it was this tax that fatally alienated the nobility from King John, leading to Magna Carta. (He also notes that John, like other Angevin kings, used special taxes on the Jews to balance his budget.)

Education is essential for effective administration, and the events here took place around the time of the establishment of the University of Paris, the first university created north of the Alps and the second in Europe after Bologna. Oxford and Cambridge were still in the future, but a sufficient number of John’s barons were literate that Magna Carta was translated into the French that most of them used day to day.

Speaking of the rule of law, I would have welcomed a few pages about the state of English law at the time. We learn that, in Henry I’s Coronation Charter, he guaranteed that women would not be married without their families’ consent (or, for widows, without their own consent) and that Magna Carta allowed women the right to bring murder cases only for the death of a husband. A bit more context would have been welcome, however: How did John’s courts work? What access did ordinary people have to justice?

It is possible, of course, that the author prefers writing about battles and governance rather than laws and charters, for there is disappointingly little here about Magna Carta and how it relates to other royal charters. And while a perfunctory genealogical chart and two maps are included, a more extensive, better annotated Angevin family tree would have been nice, along with a few pages to explain how English dominion in France was resolved in the Hundred Years’ War.

But these shortcomings aside, Stephen Church has written a thoughtful and suggestive book, instructive for anyone interested in comparative government and essential for students of early medieval England and France.

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Is Richard House’s “The Kills” an art project masquerading as a novel?

Friday, January 30th, 2015

Originally published in The Weekly Standard, February 9 2015 (http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/baghdad-quartet_831105.html)

A Baghdad Quartet
Translating the Iraq war into fiction
Ann Marlowe
February 9, 2015, Vol. 20, No. 21

When I finished The Kills, it was not with the sense of the world made right, or understood rightly, that the traditional novel aspires to, nor with the contemporary recognition that the author and I—ironists both!—share a cynical disillusionment. It was with a profound sense of loss, even anger, at Richard House, as though he’d invited me to watch him cook an elaborate dinner and then thrown it in the trash unconsumed. This feeling made more sense when I learned that House also works in visual art and film, disciplines in which frustrating the expectations of the viewer has long been part of the sophisticated practitioner’s repertoire, in which it would be a perfectly reasonable piece of performance art to make an elaborate dinner and then throw it in the trash.

This sense of disappointment takes a long time to build. For hundreds of pages, the length of a couple of novels, it’s easy to be impressed by House’s technique and thick descriptions. The first sections—which follow the oddly soulless main character, Stephen Sutler (also known as John Jacob Ford), as he flees from a remote contracting camp in Iraq to Istanbul—have most of the elements of a first-rate thriller yet suggest depths few thrillers plumb. (Much later, we learn that the tight third-person narration conceals some crucial plot points.) This portion also felt utterly convincing: Every detail, whether of a contracting office in Iraq, a truck stop on the Turkish border, or a travel agency in Istanbul, rings true. I found myself Googling the names of towns that turned out to be imaginary. House can write bravura descriptions:

They followed a man bearing flowers into the hotel lobby. The bouquet, a generous spread of cream-coloured lilies and green ferns, swayed a little obscenely as the man scampered up the steps.

Or evoke the places in between:

The road steepened as it turned, flanked on one side by a scrappy rock face, and on the other by a scattered line of garage-like workshops. Ford walked without hurry. Four children followed behind, loosely curious. A man squatted at a doorway, shirtless, skinny, and smoking while he tapped a design into an aluminium bowl held between his feet.

But soon, The Kills began to remind me of something a shrink I know says about borderline patients: “You never accumulate any emotional credit with them. Every day you start from the beginning.” That is, House never gives you any more access to his characters on the hundredth page than he did on the first. He is fearless in drawing characters from every walk of life, every ethnicity, and both genders. (For what it’s worth, House is gay.) But as soon as we begin to see things through someone’s eyes—and there are a dozen significant players—we are pulled away to another point of view. When we come back, we haven’t gotten any closer. The characters, unlike the contracting office, don’t feel as though they’re waiting for us to find them in real life.

Oddly enough, both Sutler and his boss/frenemy, the villainous Paul Geezler, are elusive and barely sketched in. We get much more biographical detail about Rem, a building contractor, and Lila, a teenaged prostitute; but even after a hundred pages in their company, they seem to have minds but not sensibilities. Yet some minor and unedifying characters in Cyprus have surprising heft. So does a doomed Iraqi translator.

I’m certain some of this is deliberate. House may be serving us notice that classic novel-reading depends on an unearned complicity with any character with whom we spend time, a literary Stockholm syndrome. It’s what visual artists have been doing for a century or so, rubbing our noses in our determination to find depth in a two-dimensional canvas. The question is how this strategy translates to fiction.

In another move reminiscent of the visual art world, House uses embedded, repeated stories within The Kills. One plot is prefigured several times, with a character called Eric Powell reading the book that we will later see another young American, Finn Cullman, writing. The villainous contractor-boss Geezler’s end is echoed in that of another, more sympathetic, character. These repetitions lessen suspense and distance us from the characters in ways that mark a limitation, rather than a mastery, of technique. When Beethoven repeats a motif, it deepens; Richard House seems to be using repetition not to probe deeper into reality but to organize a stupendously complex narrative. Or, perhaps, to suggest that much of human behavior is patterned.

This isn’t to imply that House is a trendy nihilist of the Bret Easton Ellis school. He has a moral compass—so much so that he cannot give the three arch-villains (Geezler and two French brothers) even the narrow reality of the other characters. They remain enigmatic to the end, cartoonishly evil. Even the merely flawed characters engage in moral deliberation to an unlikely degree. One ignorant young contractor takes the moral high ground—“We’re all adults,” says Santo, “and there are consequences to every action that we take”—but it’s hard to know how to parse this. On the one hand, Santo is justifying his murder of his former boss; on the other, that boss is a thoroughly bad guy.

House also tosses out, for our consideration, the idea that narrative has a moral value in itself. Rike, a German teacher, says, “Stories are how we connect. Evolution isn’t seriously about thumbs but about how we use language—that’s what raises us above dumb animals, right?” But Rike fails to understand the story she is caught in until it is too late, and that story is about a repetition compulsion, not about connecting. Like The Kills.

There is politics, too, though not where you would think. The core of The Kills is set in Iraq, yet there is nothing here about the rightness or wrongness of the war. House’s focus is on the damage to the health of American contractors working at the burn pits of an imaginary company.

In a novel of a thousand pages, it isn’t surprising that crucial plot points seem obscure—Sutler takes a brief visit to Grenoble, yet just one sentence points to his fate in the aftermath; Eric Powell seems to be dying in remote eastern Turkey, only to die again, this time for real, in Naples—but there are odd infelicities as well. Though House used to live in Chicago, his Midwestern characters speak of someone being “in hospital.” When Rem gets off a train in Kansas City to visit a former colleague named Samuels, we are told that “Samuels lived in a town called Topeka several hours away” with “an unremarkable main street of coffee houses and closed-down stores.” Topeka, the state capital of Kansas, has an abundance of tall buildings, and no one who grew up in America would think of it as “a town called Topeka.” Whenever House describes somebody going online, it feels like 1995, with a blow-by-blow account of entering a chat room or doing a Google search.

After an immersion of several weeks—sometimes wondering if it would ever end—and a couple of weeks’ reflection, this reader’s feelings about The Kills remain unresolved. It’s a complex, brilliant, flawed, ultimately unsatisfying trip halfway around the world that takes an inordinate amount of time to complete. But portions of the trip are rivetingly suspenseful, portions take us where few have gone before, and House takes the novelist’s mission as a deadly serious one.

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