Charlie Johnson in the Flames: A Novel (Paperback)

Veteran TV war correspondent Charlie Johnson has decades of “holiday from hell” assignments behind him, covering harrowing events in the trouble-spots of the world. Jaded by the carnage he is professionally paid to witness and constant numbing exposure to all forms of appalling brutality and futile, violent death, Charlie thought he had seen more than enough hellish images of violence, terror and death for any man to bear – mutilated bodies, burnt-out buildings, fire-gutted villages, sobbing women, wretched orphans – until, returning from a risky cross-border trip into war-torn Kosovo, he sees a vision from hell, a horrifying atrocity of the kind that marks the moral malaise of our age. A young Kosovar village women who sheltered him and his sidekick cameraman, Jacek, is doused with a jerry-can of gasoline and touched to flame with the flick of a lighter of a militia patrol commander – the commander caught on film by Jacek and later identified as a Serbian army colonel. Attempting to put out the woman, Charlie scorches his own hand.

With sensitivity and insight, Ignatieff explores the human cost of war, showing how the effects of this shock-horror experience can blight the life of even such a battle-hardened war reporter as Charlie. The horror of seeing the young woman burned alive before his eyes – one senseless killing too many – gets to Charlie, penetrates his protective shell of detachment, his gut-reaction being to track down and wreak vengeance on the colonel … or at least confront him in person about his motivation for the killing. The theme of revenge resonates through this novel. Charlie himself appears to have ambivalent feelings about the subject: he is painfully aware that the burning compulsion he feels for retribution and revenge – and is powerless to check – is anachronistic and contradictory to his respect for human rights. Like a thriller, the plot creates expectation that there will be a day of reckoning for the colonel in a showdown with Charlie.

The inspired title, “Charlie Johnson In The Flames”, encapsulates all the troubles that afflict Charlie. For Charlie, being “in the flames” takes many shapes and forms: his bandaged hands have been literally engulfed in flames; metaphorically, flames of anger and revenge burn deeply within him; his dreams are haunted by images of the torched village woman; mentally, he is strung up by the weight of the incident pressing on his mind, and from the emotional fall-out of a marriage under pressure. For Charlie Johnson, being “in the flames” can mean many different things – as the dramatic, unexpected denouement of this novel reveals when the moment of truth arrives!

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Charles Johnson in the Flames starts off with a woman being set on fire in an unnamed war zone in the Balkans, and the book follows Charlie's quest to find the man that did this. With this gripping start, the mounting tension is kept up throughout the book, but then literally falls flat on its face a bit at the end.

Charlie is a journalist, who tries to help the woman while his colleague's TV cameras are still running, so more could perhaps have been made of the journalist's dilemma between showing the world and helping people. It also seemed to be ridiculously easy for Charlie to track down the man responsible - nearly as if the man himself actually wanted to be found.

I did enjoy this book, and it did grip me from the start, but I was left feeling a bit disappointed at the end.

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