Artful deception

        Ford, in the first issue of the Southern Review (1935), identified the essential features of impressionism: spareness (le mot juste, one word instead of six); shortening dialogue and making it represent the character of the speaker; layering the presentation of action to achieve desired effects (building "suggestions of happenings on suggestions of happenings"); rendering action rather than reporting it; and, finally, limiting authorial presence in the novel. Rendering and limiting deserve a fuller explanation.
        Ford speaks directly to us about rendering: "You must never, that is to say, write, 'He saw a man aim a gun at him'; you must put it: 'He saw a steel ring directed at him.' " The overall effect of this technique is to make us see and experience events as the character does; we enter into another's consciousness.
        Conrad and Ford sought either to eliminate the intrusive, omniscient narrator or to limit severely the narrator's voice. Ford reminds us that Conrad invented "the convention of a Marlow," who would tell almost the whole of the story without much apparent interest in chronology, and that he went a step beyond Conrad, "eventually dispensing with a narrator but making the story come up in the mind of an unseen author with a similar want of chronological sequence." The desired effect of this particular technique is to eliminate the presence of an author who intrudes and moralizes and controls, thereby destroying the illusion of verisimilitude and our sense that we, as readers, are participating in the action of the story.
        Triage, like Anderson's earlier journalistic work with his brother Jon Lee (Inside the League and War Zones) and his own essays for Harper's (he is a contributing editor), relies heavily on these impressionistic techniques, which have become the staple of our most interesting journalism. Sanctified and codified by Tom Wolfe in Esquire (1957), the so-called New Journalism depends heavily on "scene-by-scene construction," a technique that calls for the writer to create a series of dramatic scenes which render the news and eliminate the need for conventional reporting. These crafted scenes speak for themselves--and, by extension, for the absent author. They draw us to the scene, making us veritable eyewitnesses to the action, while also heightening our sense of involvement.
        Some critics still argue that such techniques raise ethical questions about journalism's obligation to objectivity and truth, but none can argue that in the hands of a gifted novelist they create anything but beauty. In Triage they place us directly alongside Mark as he wrestles with his guilt and struggles to overcome his affliction.
        But, as I have suggested, this is not just Mark's story, nor does the novel limit itself to a dramatic enactment of a single character's psychological recovery. Rather than pulling us into the psyche of a single character, the novel's narrative forces move us continually out into the more expansive ideological landscape of war and morality and the shattering consequences of combat. They do it seamlessly, through shifts in the narrative point of view that create a progression of effects and a broadening of perspective. We occupy not one vantage post but several, so that by the end of the novel we are left with Anderson's perspective, but we have gained it indirectly through his characters and his orchestration of events. To glimpse this process, let's begin at the beginning.
        At the outset, we sense that we are inside Mark's head as he experiences the aftershock of an explosion that has already knocked him to the ground and will eventually kill Colin. But we do not know that an explosion has occurred. Instead of being told what has happened, we are made to wonder as Mark does about what has happened to him, where he is. It is as if a gun has been pointed our way, but we cannot know that it is a gun; we see only a steel circle. But in this case, the revelation comes to us even less directly than it did in Ford's example. We begin as if we are in paradise witnessing a man's awakening into a new world:
        "He lay beneath a blanket of torn flowers. They were scattered over his chest, gathered about his neck like a garland. Occasionally, the wind found his resting place; stems shifted, loose petals took flight."
        "Above him Mark saw a sky that was gray. He searched this sky for something to orient him--a patch of blue, a border of white--but the gray was unending. He thought of the land that surrounded him. It was brown and spread away for hundreds of miles, tumbled to ravines, smoothed to plain. He felt stone dust settle on his skin, licked it from his lips."
        We are sharing Mark's experiences, but we are also being led to see and know more than he can. Anderson's language--torn flowers, garland, stone dust--teases us into a separate realm of thought even as we share Mark's disorientation. We become participating voyeurs who are afforded the added pleasure of language that tips us off, keeping us simultaneously in the action and out of it.
        Gradually, we are drawn to causality, drawn deeper into Mark's mind as he puzzles over the taste on his lips:
        "It occurred to him that maybe the flowers had caused it, that here maybe even the flowers could destroy you. He envisioned the gunner, bored, gazing across all those empty miles beneath the gray sky, hour after hour, day after day, his eyes suddenly drawn to the colors Mark held in his hand. He imagined the joy the man must have felt at that moment."
        And we begin to imagine where Mark is, where we are, and to be influenced by the colors and the peculiar mind of the man on the ground who envisioned the gunner and sensed the gunner's joy at that moment when, in his sights, he saw the colors, saw the man whose mind we now occupy, saw the man he would bring down with his weapon. And then we know with more certainty what has happened.
        Yet even in these brief opening passages we have come to know what we know gradually, by piecemeal and accumulation, as Mark has come to know it. We have been held in abeyance by the novelist, yet made to feel that we have been held in abeyance by the character himself. And even that is not the whole truth. There is more, much more, to learn over time. As we gradually come to understanding, we eventually realize how willingly we have submitted to Anderson's artful deception and illusion, how skillful he is at his craft--how deliciously complicated this novel really is.

The torture of triage

        As we follow Mark's awakening on the mountaintop in Kurdistan, move with him down to the river, into the water, move underwater with him as he struggles with the unidentified burden on his back that clutches his throat, and emerge, finally, safe on the other side, this novel begins to extend beyond the boundaries of Mark's experiences. Yet this movement out to larger concerns occurs as we become more privy to the details of his personal struggle for survival. It occurs primarily through shifts in consciousness, as new characters enter the fictional world.
        On the other side of the river, Mark is rescued and taken to the Harir cave, where he has come many times to take photographs. Now, as a patient, he is subject to the judgment of the doctor whose work he has been documenting. There in the hospital cave, Ahmet Talzani practices triage, awarding colored tags to the wounded. Those considered a poor risk for recovery get the blue tags, and when time permits, they are summarily shot by the doctor himself. It is all a matter of practical necessity.
        Talzani explains to Mark that the sorting is
        ""not at all about science or medicine, just mathematics. In quiet times, when there is not a lot of fighting and I have more time, maybe even the man with a stomach wound has a chance. But then more wounded come in and he is out of luck, because now anyone who is going to take up two hours of my time to save is not worth saving. And then more wounded come in, and now time is down to an hour, a half hour, twenty minutes. You see how it goes? Simple math. Math and luck.""
        Later in the conversation, Talzani elaborates: "For me, it is all fate. Once you understand this, it makes life here much easier, for you are freed of this idea that you can prevent something from happening. Some live, some die, that's all." And then later: "Some live, some die. It's the only way to view it. Anything else is just self-torture and arrogance. Because we are not gods, none of us are gods."
        We never know what Mark thinks of these ideas about fate and the mathematics of luck. He wonders only why Talzani is back in Kurdistan after his medical training in America, why he stays. Talzani explains: "Homeland. It doesn't matter what you do or even what you believe, you will never escape the homeland. It always keeps you. They talk of free will, but we are all just homing pigeons in the end." What is so remarkable about Talzani's ideas is the transparency of their importance when we hear them. Central as they become to the novel's development and to Mark's recovery, they are slipped into this opening section without comment, providing a ground for the novel's most compelling ideas. The first of many layers, they are suggestions of suggestions that will follow.
        Consider triage. Its practitioners populate the novel's landscape. The most interesting is Joaquin Morales--Elena's grandfather--who fosters Mark's recovery and causes him eventually to face his own complicity in Colin's death. That self-serving, complex act of mercy occurs just after the artillery explosion presented at the novel's beginning, but it remains essentially hidden from us as a consequence of Mark's hiding it from himself. Yet it is burrowed beneath the surface of that opening scene, and when we finally learn of it, we are forced yet again to see the novel and its coherence in a whole new light.
        Joaquin is the most powerful and interesting character in the novel, and we see, finally, that he carries the novel's ideological weight. Talzani is his avatar and Mark his heir. He will live forever under Joaquin's ideological influence. He may also marry Joaquin's granddaughter, who will finally learn from Joaquin and Mark that her own flawed and untested idealism separates her from those she loves and from her homeland. She could learn too, but doesn't, that in her own work, with the United Nations, she also practices a form of triage as she sorts refugees and attempts to reunite them with their families. Watching her do her work, we see that she pays attention only to her successes, turning away completely from the reality of the camps themselves. She has no desire to visit them. Yet we come to see that going could acquaint her with the consequences of her own version of the applied mathematics of luck.

The beast within

        Although Joaquin is the moral center of this fictive world--a man whose war experiences taint him but whose human compassion makes him enormously appealing--he might just as easily be the Antichrist. A remnant of the Spanish Civil War, a member of Franco's special staff, a man who finally heads an institute for the "purification" of war criminals, Joaquin hardly seems a likely candidate for moral exemplar in any world, real or fictive. By ordinary standards of decency, we must judge him a murderer, a man who, like Talzani, makes repeated decisions, of his own accord, to take the lives of others.
        But Anderson's supreme accomplishment in this novel is to deny us that right. We have little choice but to take Joaquin seriously, to entertain his ideas and consider their soundness. Joaquin's very neutrality about war's dirtiest realities gives him a decided advantage as he argues for a deeply human response to those victimized by the sweep and seduction of war, including men guilty of war's most heinous crimes.
        The logic of Joaquin's claim rests in part on whether we can understand the ordinariness of modern war, its inevitability and persistence in the lives of men and women. Mark has already concluded, long before he meets Joaquin, that "most modern wars did not end. They continued for generations, heating up at times, cooling down at others, but the flames never went out." We learn that "for Mark war had become a job, and when stripped of romanticism, what this job seemed most closely to resemble was speculating on the stock market." To be successful as a war photographer, Mark has to learn to speculate on the public's interest, guessing what conflict will sell in the news.
        War Zones, the Anderson brothers' collaborative book on conflicts in Northern Ireland, El Salvador, Uganda, Sri Lanka, and Israel, begins this way: "There is always war. It is not a strange thing; in much of the world, war is commonplace and people learn to live with it." Their introduction goes on to trace war's evolution and to delineate differences among wars:
        "In the modern world, war has returned to its primitive roots. In ancient times, invaders annihilated entire populations, soldiers and civilians alike. Then, war became "civilized," a ritualized slaughter limited to opposing armies on empty ground. Today, civilians are once again war's primary victims, but their killers are rarely invaders; usually, they are the soldiers of their own governments, or the guerillas of their local "national liberation movement.""
        "In World War I, civilians were five percent of the casualties. In World War II, they were forty percent. Since 1945, about thirty million people have died in wars, over ninety percent of them civilians."
        The sense of war's inevitability and its lingering effects on the lives of those closest to it makes its way into Triage, folded into the reflections of an old man in a Spanish village. In those reflections, we hear echoes of Anderson's own conclusion to War Zones, where he tries to sum up his own experience of listening to people on both sides of the conflicts that he and his brother have investigated:
        "I had a vague image of the face of evil and a belief in my ability to recognize it, only to have it torn away by the kindness of killers when meeting them. I spoke, drank, and ate with men who had placed bombs in cars, gunned down civilians, orchestrated massacres. Often, they were very good company."
        Mark, under the tutelage of Joaquin, makes his way to Ol’a, a small village in the Alpujarra region of Spain. He is there with Elena in search of a war criminal who has captured his imagination. Carlos Perez, known as the Beast of Ol’a, could not be purified at Joaquin's institute in the aftermath of the war. Mark, believing that Carlos might be alive, asks the old villager about both him and the blood squads Carlos led against his own people and the neighboring villages. There is a hint of condemnation in Mark's question. Here is the old man's bemused reply:
        ""But, Don Mark," Antonio said, "it wasn't a question of right, or good or bad. We were having a war then. Those of us here, we were like lambs between the wolves." He raised his cane again, waved it over the mountains to the east. "There, the Republicans." He pointed his cane to the west. "Over there, the Nationalists. We were between them. All of us here were innocent, none of us political in any way, but we were between the wolves, so we had to choose. Some had to be sacrificed so the others could live, so that those who could be saved were saved. That is what happens in war. Carlos helped us choose and, fortunately for us, he chose well.""
        "The old man rested a hand on Mark's shoulder. He leaned close, and when he spoke again, his voice was barely a whisper.
        "But sadly for him, Carlos made a terrible mistake. Do you see now the mistake he made?"
        Mark saw the trace of a smile on the old man's lips. He shook his head.
        "Ol’a protected us. In his impatience, in his ambition, Carlos forgot this. He forgot that when you leave your people, you are alone and anything can happen to you. When he left this place ... Well, as I say, we were like lambs between the wolves, and none of us, even Carlos, could know what sorrow waited out there."
        The old man looked away, toward the ravines and the sea."
        What this man suggests and what Joaquin's experiences had finally taught him--represented by the stories he tells Elena to regain her love and trust--is really quite simple, basic. Joaquin has learned what Conrad reveals in Heart of Darkness, that at bottom we all have the potential to become beasts and that we are easily seduced into such a bargain. Anderson, through Joaquin, reveals how war places us in a world of killing where the traditional moral order is upended; it temporarily separates us from our conscience, and history plays the nasty trick of trying to make us believe there might be some logical explanation (politics, religion, agrarian reform) for what cannot be explained. Somewhat frustrated that he cannot make Elena understand, Joaquin presses his point: "To hell with history. If there is anything to be learned from any of it, it is only that civilization is fragile, that in war it takes nothing for a man--any man, fascist, communist, school teacher, peasant, it doesn't matter--to become a beast."
        When Elena asks him why, if he feels this way, he helped the war criminals recover, Joaquin offers a surprising reply:
        ""Precisely because I felt this way. Once I saw there was no reason for it beyond savagery, I saw how it would continue. Because when a man falls into savagery, he continues to fall. Kill once and killing is easy, it becomes routine--eventually, it even becomes a cure for the spiritual torment, a cycle without end. This is what happens in war, any war. But eventually one side of killers will win, and what happens then? I will tell you: The slaughter continues as long as the killers remain separated from their consciences. That was the situation we faced in 1939. ...""

The homelessness of war