AFGHAN REALITY AND ILLUSION
Scottish writer journeys beyond war zone
The Illuminations Andrew O’Hagan McClelland & Stewart
“I’m not especially courageous,” Andrew O’Hagan admits with a sigh.
But he knows he could never have completed his new novel, The Illuminations, without visiting Afghanistan two years ago.
“I’m not a warrior,” the awardwinning journalist and novelist says in the soft cadences of his native Scotland. “I’m a guy who sits in a room with a keyboard in front of me. But if I was going to write about a conflict situation, I had to go and taste it — taste the heat, the dust, the sense of starkness that I knew existed.”
So O’Hagan had to go there. But the resulting novel journeys beyond the war zones of the Middle East because O’Hagan wanted to cast a wider net in exploring the elusiveness of truth. And his chance discovery of the work of an almost-forgotten Canadian photographer provided another essential thread to a book that has already been published in Britain to huge acclaim and now in Canada by McClelland & Stewart.
Looking thoroughly Scottish in a heavy-knit, roll-neck sweater, O’Hagan spoke with Postmedia News soon after the London Daily Telegraph published an outspoken interview with the 46-year old author — an interview charging that Britain’s disastrous Afghan involvement constituted his country’s Vietnam War.
“We didn’t win the hearts and minds,” he says. “We didn’t turn the native population to democracy as we see it. We failed to understand the tribal system there. We failed to take into account their own values and sense of future, and ultimately we failed to build the coalitions with army and police we thought we had. So by accident and design, we created a Vietnam for ourselves.”
Overseas critics are saying The Illuminations contains the best war fiction to emerge from the Afghan conflict. But for O’Hagan, a writer of Orwellian sensibility, the Afghan war was but one portal for pursuing a recurring concern — the conflict between illusion and reality. Which is why the novel also takes us to Ayrshire, where an elderly Scottish-Canadian woman is sinking into dementia, and then reaches its climax at the English seaside resort of Blackpool, where its world-famous illuminations are a triumph of artifice.
There’s a seminal moment in the novel when Luke Campbell, a 29-year-old captain, assailed by growing doubts about the justness of the Afghan war and coping with the dread reality of a superior officer who is unravelling mentally, is forced to lead his platoon into a catastrophic ambush and the bloody slaughter of civilians at a wedding party. For Luke, it’s “a day of reckoning” — he can no longer stifle his growing doubts about his own life and the justness of this war.
O’Hagan’s own moment of truth came with a visit to an Afghan school.
“What I saw, after years of supposed enlightenment and struggle and loss of British, Canadian, and American lives, was a girls’ school where the drinking water had been poisoned by extremist fanatics. In 2013, years into a supposedly emancipating war, we had failed to protect a school of girls from the Taliban.”
The Illuminations is O’Hagan’s fifth novel, but it’s his journalism that has made him a media star in the United Kingdom. Last year, he triggered international waves when the London Review of Books published his scathing memoir of what happened when he took on the hapless task of serving as ghostwriter for self-absorbed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Recently, he triggered more controversy when he wrote about identity theft: He explained how easy it was for him to steal the identity of a dead person and achieve a bogus reality on the Internet.
There’s also a comic side to him — hence his hilarious skewering of Fifty Shades Of Grey and the audacity of a 2010 novel purporting to be the memoir of Marilyn Monroe’s dog.
His intellectual curiosity takes him in unexpected directions — which is how he discovered Canadian photographer Margaret Watkins, whose simple image of a kitchen sink was recently reproduced on a stamp issued by Canada Post.
“I saw that photograph in an old magazine, and I was mesmerized by how good it was, how beautifully composed and lit it was, by how strange and translucent it was as a depiction of reality. I wanted to know more about the woman who made this picture. I was mesmerized by the size of her talent and the size of her neglect.”
Watkins, a forgotten figure when she died in Scotland in 1969, became O’Hagan’s inspiration for Anne, the elderly Canadian-born woman who once created her own brilliant illusions of reality but whose mind is now retreating into the unreliable mists of memory as she lives out her last years in Ayrshire.
Anne is also the beloved grandmother of Luke, the young officer who has undergone his own shattering epiphany in Afghanistan and is in desperate need of some moral certainties. And even in the twilight of her awareness, even as she continues to find sad sustenance in her own self-deceptions and illusions, Anne is able to offer Luke a way out of his emotional quagmire.
“I very much wanted to ground Luke’s experience within a family and a community,” O’Hagan says. Two sorts of family dynamic emerge. One is the “family” of Luke’s platoon: “I wanted to demonstrate the real sense of commitment and fellow feeling that can exist among young soldiers still — these men love each other and will go that extra mile for each other.” The other relates to Luke’s own personal family history: “Anne’s is a life as dramatic and tempestuous and full of illusion as the front in Afghanistan. She’s fighting her own war with truth and dealing with the past.”
So what does O’Hagan hope readers take away from this book?
“A sense of tolerance,” he says simply, “a sense of moral expansion.”