Conscripts of Another Kind

Well Worth Reading

In the June 6 issue of the New Yorker, Sarah Stillman has a heartbreaking article exploring the world of “TCNs.” “Third-country nationals” are the bulk of the workers on American military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. They’re recruited from poor nations, promised cushy jobs in Dubai and instead find themselves doing support work on American military bases.

The Army doesn’t even have direct oversight of the worker’s living conditions or wages, so both are dismal. Workers lived boxed together in shipping containers. There have been protest riots over the lack of food, and sexual assault is a common threat for female workers. The government seems to acknowledge that oversight is needed, but no one steps up to actually do it.

It’s another tragic byproduct of the desire to pinch pennies while keeping the American military enmeshed in two countries a world away. It’s a frustrating read, one that doesn’t inspire hope that things will change any time soon.

Review: Saturday

Books

Ian McEwan’s Saturday is a compilation of beautiful sentences housed in a dramatically inert package. It captures a long day in the life of neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, one encompassing everything from London’s massive anti-Iraq war protests to preparing fish soup for a long-awaited family dinner.

Perowne is our rational narrator throughout, dissecting the day’s events much as he unknots the imperfect anatomies of his patients. Most of the pages are occupied with meditations on family: the passion he—almost with surprise—still bears for his wife, the pain of a mother lost to senility, the uncertainty of watching children pursue their own paths.

The war protests extend the novel’s focus, letting different characters voice the familiar arguments of the time. Here and in his home life, Perowne is swayed by all sides. His default mode is analysis—often overanalysis—which leaves him unable to commit to the certainties of those around him. His daughter, a poet, assigns him novels he’s constitutionally incapable of appreciating. She’s similarly blocked by his inability to unambiguously condemn the bombing that’s about to begin.

Perowne weighs her arguments, weighs his own, weighs the impact of his response to her, weighs why they’re even driven to fight at all. McEwan captures his thoughts in elegantly stacked paragraphs, immaculate lines of impeccable phrasing. But he also lets the title character fall into a passivity that robs the book of its narrative drive.

Perowne observes and remembers, clinically weighing everything he encounters during his day. Ambitiously, McEwan aims to establish his narrator as an avatar of reason. He’s trying to capture something mechanistic about science and surgery and express it as a worldview. But while each observation feels true-to-life, the cumulative weight seems inessential, especially when so much of the Perowne family’s life is defined by conspicuous privilege.

“Saturday” can be a hard read. The pages are rewarding, but they don’t call you back when they’re set aside. McEwan ultimately does overtake the navel-gazing with two wonderful scenes of conflict. The book even ends with a neat twist of salvation, mechanistic redemption from an unspiritual man. But it takes a lot of patience to get there, and the reward outweighs the effort only slightly.

Review: X’ed Out

Books, Comics

Charles Burns’ X’ed Out is a rich teaser for what promises to be a compelling graphic vision. Much of the volume is dedicated to table setting, as our title character alternates between art-school striving and an Hergé-inspired exploration of an alien world.

A sewer drain, handfuls of red pills and an unexplained injury ease the passage between the two settings. Burns’ art style signals the changes as well. He adopts a ligne claire technique for his strange new land and a more lifelike, shadowy style for flashbacks here on earth.

Both places hold our interest. Burns parcels out the strangeness of the sewer world, employing a native guide to temper its weirdness. The feral scenesters on earth are also evoked in all their youth—cruel, striving, a little pretentious and maybe a little precocious as well.

Burns ably captures the feel of an artist’s community. He doesn’t deny how seriously the characters take their work, but he folds in the possibility that it may just be an excuse to get drunk and be weird for a while.

The ending draws you to the next volume, as developments on the new world—and the origin of the title character’s injury—are ominously foreshadowed. I look forward to reading the full work—even if it may take a while to be completed.