We Are Now Beginning Our Descent

By James Meek. HarperCollins, 295 pp, $29.95, hardcover

James Meek is a distinguished foreign correspondent with the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper and has tried to bring those experiences to his latest novel We Are Now Beginning Our Descent. Set between October 2001 and December 2002—the aftermath of 9/11 and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan—it centres on the troubled relationship between Adam Kellas, a British war reporter, and Astrid Walsh, an enigmatic American journalist.

Kellas is trying to write a Tom Clancy–style bestseller in which the Americans are ignorant villains at war with wisecracking Europeans, but his first draft’s intended climax has been usurped by Osama bin Laden. “It hadn’t occurred to Kellas,” Meek writes, “that men might find it easier to sell their thrilling, unlikely narratives to the masses by asking armies of believers to perform them than to vend their imaginations at airport bookstalls in the usual way.”

Not “brave enough to be thought a coward”, Kellas goes to Afghanistan to cover the war for the Citizen, a fictitious British newspaper, and meets Astrid, who is seen as a loner by her fellow hacks: “She’s a cat. She hunts by herself. She always goes after what she wants and you have to follow her or let her go.”

Fourteen months later, Kellas flees to see her in rural Virginia following his violent outburst at a London dinner party that leaves him with a cut on his arm, out of a job, and seemingly alienated from his closest friends.

These timelines interweave constantly throughout the novel, as we follow the lovers on their separate paths to self-destruction and possible redemption. Meek’s previous novel, The People’s Act of Love, was a vivid and brutal tour de force, and held out hope that this new work would be more of the same. Unfortunately, however, Meek’s deft touch has deserted him here, leaving many characters lacking depth and, with all the shifting times and places, making for a sometimes disjointed read.