BR: Triage (Scott Anderson)

Amazon Link: Triage

Mark Walsh wakes on a hilltop in Kurdistan, injured, disoriented, the victim of an artillery attack. As a war photographer, he is no stranger to violent atrocities, death and near misses, but this event disintegrates his mind, leaving him in a stuporous half-state that sees him through his initial physical recovery in a remote, clandestine guerrilla hospital, then his return to Brooklyn where his wife, Elena, struggles to make sense of his symptoms.

As Mark’s physical state worsens and he denies her the full story of how he was injured, Elena pushes him to seek medical help, but Mark refuses, trapped in a body that is betraying him and with emotions that alternately numb and overwhelm him. Meanwhile, Diane, heavily pregnant and the wife of Mark’s best friend and photographic buddy, Colin, fears for her missing husband. Mark and Colin set out to Kurdistan together, but split up before Mark’s accident. Despite Elena and Diane’s fears for Colin’s welfare, Mark assures them that Colin is simply delayed and will return home soon.

Complicating Elena’s progress with Mark is her grandfather, Joaquin, a man who raised her after her own father died in a car accident but whom she disowned after learning of his involvement with war criminals after the 1930’s Spanish war. Joaquin, a self-proclaimed psychologist, established an asylum for officers and soldiers who had committed heinous acts of inhumanity and brutality during the years of fighting. These men, unable to return to their families and too dangerous to be allowed to return to society without psychological intervention, were passed to Joaquin to ‘cure’. And, so he did, according to the history books. Elena is unable to forgive Joaquin for housing and healing men who, she believed, were beyond forgiveness.

After Mark collapses and is hospitalised, his symptoms determined to be psychosomatic, Elena’s mother calls in Joaquin, believing him to be the only person who can heal Mark’s trauma ravaged mind. Joaquin journeys from Spain to Brooklyn, ignores Elena’s attempts to keep him from Mark, and commences his own form of therapy. The journey taken by all three is dark – of solitude and grief, of guilt and laying blame, of denial and ultimate responsibility.

Scott Anderson makes no attempt to gloss over the horror of war, neither does he revert to bloody gore. Instead, he exhibits rare restraint and by doing so he crafts a story that drills to the very core of the reader, leaving much to the imagination, painting scenes and images that are horrific in their ghastly serenity. Mark recalls experiences that are unequivocally stomach churning – no person could witness those events and walk away unscarred, yet Mark tried to… tried and failed.

Scott is a former foreign correspondence, he writes from experience, from the heart, from the soul. It shows in his writing. No-one but a man who has experienced these horrors first hand could write such a jagged, emotionally crippling books such as this.

Few books bring me to tears, this one did. Few books stay with me, a part of me as though they have carved their will into my soul; this one did. I can’t recommend it highly enough, but it’s not a pretty read, not a happy story, though the ending does bring hopeful closure for the three main characters. It is the journey that will linger long after these characters have moved on.

As an aside, while reading this book I had a chance encounter with a stranger on a train who noticed me reading and admitted that he is a photo journalist and had read the book. I was only halfway through and asked him what he thought. He chose his words carefully, spoke in a sparse, measured way (almost pained), and admitted that it was ‘difficult’. I now have a greater appreciation of what he means.

Rating: *****+ (out of five)