The Lotus Eaters (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

The Lotus Eaters is a fantastic book that is shockingly misrepresented by its cover picture of a delicate young woman with a red flower in her hair, and especially its summary on the back cover, because it is most certainly not a romantic book.

Like Homer's Lotus Eaters, these soldiers and journalists alike are intoxicated by war and they lose the will to return home. This is the story of how observing death and destruction on a daily basis corrupts and changes the observer. It is the tale of a young woman who changes from an enthusiastic photographer who can't stand the thoughts of *chicken* dying, to a hardened veteran who is numbed even to the death of her own brother.

This book is brilliant and I heartily recommend it. Just don't expect to read much about love and romance.

Let me stress from the outset this is not a book based on a drama about a group of British expatriates living on the island of Crete! Indeed Tatjana Soli's wonderful and evocative debut novel shifts the attention further east to the Vietnam War and the close of one of the most brutal conflicts in modern warfare. The Vietnam conflict stills haunts America and this novel seeks to capture the "the hallucinatory atmosphere of war" but more than this. Ostensibly a love story there are many deeper themes and currents which underpin this work, not least that in terms of "ghosts" the novels main protagonist Helen Adams has lost her father and brother in the conflict. Thus the Lotus Eaters starts at that time when the Vietcong are descending on the city and concluding the process that will lead to the terrible and shameful debacle of the Fall of Saigon. This year is unbelievably the 35th anniversary of the event and yet the images of panic, despair and thunderous Huey helicopters plucking desperate people from the roof of the fortress-like US embassy are indelibly marked on our consciousness.

It is in this context that Helen Adams an ambivalent and inexperienced war photographer operates. Granted she does bear a distant resemblance to Jeremy Renner's character "Sergeant William James" in the Hurt Locker, but this is not whole story. Indeed a novel written from the perspective of a woman in the war zone is one of this novels key USPs and Soli has brought real insights in this regard; not least the condescending attitude to the presence of anyone without at an Adams apple and at least three days worth of stubble. Her character is a willing participant to this conflict and an obsessed interpreter of violence. The sentence which sets the tone for the book comes early when Adams admits that "It had always fascinated her, what happens when things break down, what are the basic units of life"? To her the end of the war amounts to a source of frustration rather than a relief, not least her continued search for that Pulitzer-worthy picture. Her relationship to the Vietnamese assistant Linh is at the core of the book alongside an unusual "Ménage à trois" involving an earlier affair with a celebrated and veteran fellow photographer called Sam Darrow. The key to the book however is Soli's ability to skilfully weave around this complex romance a tale of the Vietnam War evoking in crystal like prose its sights, overbearing heat, pungent smells and the narrative of a thousand small Saigon tragedies.

Neither despite its central theme is this novel simply a romance. The characters are all very human, very flawed and often in very real danger. Linh the main Vietnamese character is a man torn between his country and the woman he loves but more than this his deeper understanding of what is unfolding in front of his eyes. He is character you grow to like and care about. The book also brings in the big themes with the novel populated with vivid battle scenes and you sense "outside" of the novel the geo politics being played and manipulated.

As this book drew to a very satisfying conclusion, and as I devoured it over the past week I have thought about it many times since. (Always a good sign of a great book). Yes there are some weaknesses in the "Lotus Eaters" since along with echoes of the Hurt Locker some of the story seems archetypal and does recall themes from the many Vietnam films over the years not least the Killing Fields (even though that is set in Cambodia). But these are minor qualms, indeed with the presence of a woman as her central character Soli has tapped into a fascinating and unique central theme. As she states in the foreword to the Lotus Eaters the inspiration for this was drawn simply from a picture in a book of war photography which captured Dickey Chapelle the first female war correspondent in Vietnam. Soli admits that the picture literally "stopped me... and I found my subject". One would add in return she has done her subject real justice with debut novel that his handled with deftness and elegant writing. The Lotus Eaters is destined to become a great film and it will "take root" in the best seller lists. It is a very persuasive, tormented and tenacious novel and for a debut it is superbly written and most importantly a mesmerizing read.

American photojournalist Helen Adams attempts to flee the fall of Saigon with her Vietnamese husband Linh, but she is drawn back into the war with her determination to capture history. This is a beautiful novel that tells the story of Helen's years in Vietnam, from naive young woman hoping to make a career as a photographer, to hardened journalist who will risk everything for the perfect shot.

I don't know a lot about Vietnam, but this is a fascinating story that brilliantly captures the claustrophobic atmosphere of a tropical war and the effect it has on those who are caught up in it. Helen has a troubled past, her brother was killed in the war, and that initially drives her to become a photojournalist there. When she arrives she forms a relationship with veteran photographer Sam Darrow, a man obsessed by the war, and she is greatly influenced by him.

Helen's relationship with Darrow actually is a greater focus of the novel than her relationship with Linh, Darrow's assistant, who falls for her quietly and is content to spend his life in the background. Much of the novel explores the dynamic between the three characters, and the different ways they deal with the war. But as Helen and Linh's love affair develops it creates a very intense and moving relationship that spans cultures.

This book is fantastically well written, the language is very poetic and evocative. The descriptions of Vietnam, whether the jungle, a village or the city, and of the Vietnamese people, really bring the story to life, and I was fascinated by a culture I knew little about. If you're a fan of literary fiction, powerful stories of love and/or war, or just love to be transported to another world by a really intelligent book, then I recommend this, it's excellent.