Moral chaos
TORONTO — Murder happens in the course of Kevin Patterson’s new novel, News From The Red Desert.
The dead are victims of torture — innocent victims.
After all, this is Afghanistan, and the ideals of freedom and democracy must be upheld. Or so those who sanction these crimes would argue.
“The torture is (a) historical fact,” says Patterson, a Canadian doctor who spent six weeks with NATO forces in Afghanistan in 2007. And yes, he was often moved to anger when writing his harrowing morality tale.
“It’s about the way conflict perpetuates itself. It’s about how war and violence demean everything they touch. And it’s about how seductive it is. As bad as it all is, it draws the eye and excites the heart. Certainly, at a distance, people can love it. But not many people can love it when they see it close up.”
The U.S. Senate’s incendiary report on CIA torture came out while Patterson was working on
News From The Red Desert. Its findings validate the horrors he describes in his novel.
“I wish the revelation that torture had been done created more of an uproar,” Patterson says sombrely. “The forced rectal feeding and the hanging upside down — all this is out of the Senate torture report. This is what was done, Our collective ability just to look the other way and shrug and say, ‘Well, bad things happen’ — that’s shocking. It’s as shocking as the acts themselves.”
Patterson, 51, is chatting in the Toronto office of his publisher, Random House. He cuts a rugged figure: Indeed, he looks as though he might just have emerged from a wilderness hike or stepped off a sailboat — vibes that seem entirely natural given that he lives on Salt Spring Island off the B.C. coast and had his first literary success with
The Water In Between, a memoir of a sailing expedition in the Pacific. That work of travel literature remains his most personal book.
“It’s all about escapism and instinct and men who want to be self-sufficient and see travel as a corrective for their problems,” he says.
But in no way can his other writings be described as escapism. There’s his earlier novel,
Consumption, dealing with Inuit culture. There’s Talk To Me Like
My Father, which offered so candid an account of his time as a doctor with NATO forces in Afghanistan, that its publication in the U.S. magazine, Mother Jones, landed him in controversy.
And now there’s this explosive new novel, News From The
Red Desert, which begins with the George W. Bush White House falsely assuming that the war against the Taliban has been won — an assumption demolished by subsequent events. “There’s a problem with an easily won war,” Patterson says. “The Americans went in, and they lost very few people in kicking out the Taliban. But easily won wars are very dangerous because they incline people to make bad decisions and over-estimate their own capacity.”
Much of what happens in the novel is seen through the eyes of Deirdre O’Malley a U.S. war correspondent who develops a fierce, protective love for the men and women in combat.
“Deirdre is brilliant and smart,” Patterson says. “She is brought to the war zone and … like a lot of such journalists, she’s attracted to the narrative, to the spectacle.” But Deirdre, who is embedded with the Canadian infantry, finds her loyalties severely tested when she can no longer ignore evidence of the unsavoury role of U.S. agencies in the slaughter of civilians and the use of torture in interrogation.
A shocking act of terrorism powers the latter section of the novel. But Patterson doesn’t allow this calamity to be perceived in simple black-and-white terms. The reader has come to know the perpetrator too well to apply the “terrorist” label to him with any degree of confidence. Which explains why Patterson applies the term “moral chaos” to the Afghanistan conundrum.
“I’m not a pacifist,” he stresses. “I think there are rare instances where it’s necessary to use force. The Second World War was necessary, and has been this great problem for us ever since, because it’s this example of a morally justifiable conflict. Because it so dominates the way we think about history and conflict, we think most wars are like the Second World War, and that’s not what most wars are.
“The thing about force is that it requires acceptance of the possibility of things going wrong in a completely unpredictable way.”
Patterson put himself through medical school at the University of Manitoba by enlisting in the Canadian forces. He later worked as a doctor in the Arctic and Canada’s West Coast while acquiring a master’s degree in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. He continues to practise medicine. “But I still need to descend to this other place — writing.”
But he continues to be haunted by Afghanistan. “I don’t think anything has been accomplished in Afghanistan. I don’t think anything is being accomplished in Syria — nothing that will endure anyway.” And of course Washington’s Iraq adventure was a “disaster.”
He deplores the way popular culture perceives these conflicts. He sees Clint Eastwood’s hit film
American Sniper as near pornography … “glorifying the killing of people from two kilometres away.” The award-winning Zero Dark Thirty is just as bad in “validating the use of torture.”
And then there is Canada’s own Kiefer Sutherland as the intrepid Jack Bauer in the long-running TV series 24.
“Kiefer Sutherland was directly participating in portraying and defending torture. That whole series defended torture. It got results — therefore it was morally defensible.”
Patterson cites polls in which more than 50 per cent of Americans now agree torture is a reasonable response to terrorism. “Prior to the current era, that would have been unthinkable,” he says.
“The act of coercive interrogation is fundamentally an assault on human dignity that is something we’ve reviled for many years until quite recently.”
“And we make noises about reviling it in Canada to this day. But we really voiced no objections to the Americans doing what they were doing as we served alongside them.”