by Robert Fisk
Fourth Estate, 522pp, £14.99GIVEN ITS TITLE, IT MIGHT BE tempting to conclude that Robert Fisk's latest salvo of essays is focused on war, on its causes and costs.
Fisk, a veteran of wars over 32 years, firs
t as foreign correspondent of The Times, and latterly as Middle East correspondent of the Independent, has been tempered at the front lines in Northern Ireland, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine.
He is famously polemical, a moralist whose pen has rarely been held in a velvet glove, and whose opinions have not been subject to dilution. He is no-one's lackey.
But, what emerges here is a fistful of Fisks, not just the award- winning, solitary, salutary essayist chasing his own moral indignation. Here we find Fisk the literary analyst, the movie critic (the first journalistic role he ever craved), the devoted son of a father whose deathbed he did not attend, the modern historian and the old boy of Sutton Valence, perusing tenderly the obituaries of his fellows: "We can admire those who went before us … good men who believed in things which I hope I now also believe in" – his tone dipped in reverie and reverence here. A rare moment.
Ah yes, perspective – the fruit of Fisk's many years on the stump – is setting in. There is, too, a graphic awareness of death (which, if this book aspires to a theme, is surely its permeating presence). He alludes to the deaths of parents, grandparents and colleagues, to those cut down by acts of war and by acts of torture.
His sense of mortality is heightened by the fizz of passing bullets changing the barometric pressure around his own ears. There is courage, dignity and poignancy in these pages, not least when he pin-points his "weekly need to write something at a right-angle to the days gone by, the need to explore one's own anger as well as the gentler, kinder moments in a life that has been spent – let me speak bluntly – that has been used up … watching human folly on a massive, unstoppable scale".
From his apartment block in Beirut, he enjoys a balcony seat when Israel pumps its primed rockets on the city. He writes at first hand, with eye-witness bluntness as well as sharpness, about the destruction of innocent lives, the corruption of minds.
His weekly columns – of which this book is an assortment – are often combustible on the subjects of Blair and Bush, on US and British foreign policy, the "US making the rules as it goes along".
He attacks his colleagues in the media for compliance, for their supposed lack of "bias", which, he suspects "is now the great sickness of our western press and television". He is angry, cynical, strident.
There is far too little here of those "gentler, kinder moments", and when they arise, as in a moving recollection of his grandfather, tight-fisted Arthur, flinging farthings across the garden for the boy Fisk to retrieve and count, even then a determined, sermonising tendency kicks in, and Arthur's farthings are compared with Tony Blair's legacy, as the coins, after Arthur's passing, still "rise up to break our mower blades and blight my mother's flowers".
Another essay, on global warming, "Fear climate change, not our enemies", moves with cunning from its topic into the province of the perennial "War on Terror", attacking the bogeymen, Blair and Bush, scaremongers all.
Fisk's tendency to mock, berate and castigate, to poke fun and acutely satirise the foreign policies of the governments he believes have made hell in Iraq, sacrificed Palestine and ignited the Middle East, is a palpable tide that streams unchecked throughout the book. It is overwhelming.
This may be a function of having to read 100-plus essays in short-order time to review the book. But I couldn't help thinking that such is the avalanche of similar – sometimes repeated – facts, accusations and assertions (sometimes unsupported by evidence), that the effect is doomed to work contrary to the message being purveyed.
Less might be more; a little hush might make us listen all the harder. For what Fisk writes, in his often brilliant, highly authoritative prose, is indeed a wake-up call.
Read "God damn that democracy" and "Gold-plated taps" back to back and you have, in a nutshell, the brutal truth of the Middle East problem succinctly expressed, together with proof that Fisk at his best is a hard act to match.
The full article contains 761 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
