Adam Kellas is a journalist- more specifically, a war reporter, and the novel starts with him covering the American war against the Taleban in Afghanistan post-9/11. Actually, it starts with a passage from the deliberately bad, sub-Frederick Forsyth thriller Rogue Eagle Rising that he’s writing. It’s pretty execrable stuff, and he knows it, but after the failure of his several literary novels, he’s ready to sell out. While in Afghanistan, Kellas meets the American writer Astrid, and the novel is essentially the story of Kellas’s pursuit of Astrid, in a journey that takes in Afghanistan, London, New Jersey and Iraq.

Structurally the journey involves a fair number of flash-backs and initially this all got quite confusing, but after about 100 pages it all started to come together, and the second half of the book felt much more pacy and focused. Meek’s own experiences as a war reporter is apparent in his descriptions of the Afghanistan conflict, which capture the mixture of confusion, ennui and occasional explosions of action involved. He is keen to explore the position of journalists at war – are they truly neutrals, or by trailing around after the combatants, do they acquire guilt by association? In this light, Astrid’s decision to obtain a handgun can be seen as symbolic of a wider question.

Kellas has a pretty torrid time in pursuit of Astrid, as we learn more about their history together, through more flashbacks. By the time he is reunited with her in New Jersey, it looks as though a happy ending might be achievable (I’m a sucker for a happy ending). Alas, nothing’s quite so simple for Kellas, and there is a twist in the tale.

At times when reading this book, especially at the start, I felt shades of one of my least favourite writers, Howard Jacobson, but Kellas turns out to be somewhat more sympathetic than Jacobsen’s misogynistic characters, although he does have flashes of genuine unpleasantness. Ultimately I think I enjoyed this book, and I was sympathising with Adam Kellas’s trials and tribulations and rooting for him by the end. I just hope that when I write a novel it’s better than Rogue Eagle Rising!

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