The misery continues. After my last post on despair - on the withdrawal from reading life, or the duplicity that is Amazon’s recommendations - I embarked on Robert Fisk’s monumental The war on Civilisation, its 1283 pages traversing the life of Bill Fisk and the modern Middle East that was bequeathed to us by his father’s generation. Pulled into journalistic light are accounts of Western government connivance with the regime of pre-liberated Iraq and the systematic extermination of the Armenian Christians in Turkey in the midst of the First World War.
Fisk has a touch of the Solzhenitsyn in him, as when Oliver Myers points out that
sharp-focus reporting is submerged as horror is piled on horror
True enough, the wave of “atrocity witnessing” is unrelenting. One wonders how this journalist maintains his sense of self, if at all.
So the misery continues. Not in the failure of reading that forced me on this journey with Fisk, but in the lack of redemptive coming together of the whole, a trace of which is evident in his previous Pity the Nation. Perhaps it is Fisk’s integrity that prevents him from making that leap; perhaps it is the vacuous nature of this (and a hundred-fold books’) reception. It is a different kind of despair now.
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