Charlie Johnson in the Flames: A Novel

by Michael Ignatieff

Overview

In his critically acclaimed New York Times Notable Book, Michael Ignatieff tells a story of striking contemporary relevance that has drawn comparisons to the novels of Graham Greene and Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers. Charlie Johnson is an American journalist working for a British news agency somewhere in the Balkans. He believes that over the course of a long career he has seen everything, but suddenly he finds himself more than simply a witness. A woman who has been sheltering Charlie and his crew is doused in gasoline and set on fire by a retreating Serbian colonel. As she stumbles, burning, down the road, Charlie dashes from hiding, throws her down rolling her over and over to extinguish the flames, burning his hands in the process. Believing the woman's life to have been saved, Charlie is traumatized by her death. Something snaps. He now realizes he has just one ambition left in life: to find the colonel and kill him.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802141828
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	11/30/2004
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

Editorial Reviews

Ignatieff possesses one of the most impressive r sum s in contemporary letters. A Harvard-based scholar, he writes for an array of high-profile outlets, including the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and has produced well-regarded works of history (Blood and Belonging, etc.), memoir (The Russian Album, etc.) and fiction (Asya and Scar Tissue, shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize). Thus readers may be disappointed by this slight novel, which doesn't make full use of the author's literary powers. Charlie Johnson is a familiar type, a world-weary war correspondent who neglects his family and only feels at home in ravaged countrysides and in the seedy hotel bars that are "someone's idea of an oasis." He's covering yet another armed conflict, somewhere in the former Yugoslavia, when something truly shocking occurs: a woman is set on fire before his eyes. Charlie, feeling responsible for her death, sinks into a depression, leaves his wife and daughter, and hides out on the Polish farm of his cameraman, Jacek. Only one thing is able to rouse Charlie from his convalescence the idea of inflicting serious physical harm on the brutal commander who supervised the burning. He returns to Belgrade and joins up with a "fixer" named Buddy, determined to find the commander no matter what the personal cost. Ignatieff, who has covered his share of nasty conflicts, doesn't glamorize the war journalist's trade but neither does he move beyond the standard clich s (the neglected wife, the nagging boss, the loyal sidekick). This is a readable but standard tale of redemption and revenge, one that would have benefited from the layers of psychological and political insight that Ignatieff brings to the rest of his work. (Oct.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

For an aging war correspondent in Kosovo circa 1998, Charlie Johnson is strangely oblivious to the politics of his profession and personal life. That all changes, however, when he and his cameraman, under an insider's supervision, venture into the borderland in pursuit of a story that will boost their egos and bust the balls of their younger competitors. When an early patrol nearly finds out the trio, they take cover in a villager's root cellar, only to alert the Serbs accidentally to her. As punishment, she and her house are set on fire; soon after, she dies. In what could be called a revenge-cum-morality tale, second-time novelist Ignatieff (Scar Tissue) wisely avoids diatribe for surging emotional suspense that doubles for plot. While Charlie does hopscotch around Eastern and Western Europe in search of absolution and the murderer-colonel responsible for the blaze, he logs more miles in his mind, which cannot let go of the image of the burning girl. Readers will be hooked from the get-go and wish that Charlie's odyssey weren't quite so short. A fine complement to the author's nonfiction works-and a shoo-in for book groups-this is highly recommended for all collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/03; see "Must-Reads for Fall," p. 40.]-Heather McCormack, "Library Journal" Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

A journalist decides to avenge one of the many atrocities he's witnessed, in a third novel (Scar Tissue, 1994, etc.) by political commentator-historian Ignatieff (Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, 2001, etc.). There are few more clichéd characters than the seasoned war journalist-but few more compelling. Witness Charlie Johnson, the rough soul here. Charlie, who's covered wars since Vietnam, has been based out of London of late, where he has a family that he never sees because he's globetrotting to flashpoints with his rock-solid Polish cameraman Jacek. But Charlie gets set off when he and Jacek are trying to cover a story in Kosovo, circa 1998, and a Serb patrol comes through the village, setting fires. As Charlie and Jacek hide in a dugout, the woman who sheltered them is doused in gasoline and set on fire by the soldiers: "As she ran, her arms were like wings of flame, and she blundered into you in an embrace of fire." Horribly burned himself, Charlie recuperates first under US Navy care, then at Jacek's remote farmhouse-his wife's phone calls going unanswered. Deeply scarred once too often by the memories of war, Charlie begins to harbor fantasies of revenge on the officer responsible for the woman's death. When Charlie goes back to London, he acts out like a petulant teenager, playing the seasoned pro who has to explain nothing to anybody because he's looked evil in the face and been marked forever. Ignatieff's prose, which can tend toward the stiff, is best when describing Charlie in this self-righteous but resolutely unwise state of mind, formed by decades of violence: "It seemed obvious to him now that he had been left almost completely untouched by his life. Tired of it,perhaps, but untouched, as if it had all been just a very long action movie and no curtain." Charlie's return to the Balkans seems less a mission of justice than an acting-out of something he once saw in a movie. Bold, slashing view of the tiresome banality of evil. Agent: Derek Johns/A.P. Watt, London

Kirkus Reviews