By Connor Mendenhall

Turkish class. Students have just learned the abilitative mood. Ä°nce, the instructor, is holding up pictures of common household objects, and students are practicing their grammar by describing what they can and cannot do with them.

Ä°nce: A ball!

Kathy: You can throw it, but you can’t eat it.

Ä°nce: True. What about a pen?

Henning: I can write a letter, but I can’t write an email.

Ä°nce: Good job! A bowl?

Jennifer: You can eat soup, but you can’t eat a sandwich with it.

Ä°nce: A knife?

Connor: I can rinse it in a sink to wash off the blood, but I can never scrub away the human stain.

Ä°nce and class: …

Ä°nce: What about a  shoe?

II.

“Devil May Care,” the latest post-Fleming James Bond novel, is another ”horribly efficient” contribution to the Bond canon. British author Sebastian Faulks, better known for literary works like his novel ”Birdsong,” cranked out his bit of the Bond saga in a mere six weeks. It’s not hard to tell. The story reads as if Faulks sat down with a stack of paperbacks from Fleming’s back catalog and a copy of Umberto Eco’s critical essay “Narrative Structure in Fleming,” and started ticking off boxes on the checklist of requisite story elements like a fourth grader writing a book report (his novel is an ADBCADFGEGHBHI on the Eco-meter, by the way).

But Fleming, after all, set a rather ambitious authorial agenda of his own, writing a Bond novel every year during his two-month vacation in Jamaica. And Faulks fakes Fleming so well and with such fun that it’s hard to hold the banality against him.

Consider the panache with which he ticks off those boxes: an Eastern European villain with a hideous deformity and a maniac eccentricity? Check. Here it’s Dr. Julius Gorner, a Lithuanian opiate magnate born with a monkey paw and raised with an obsessive hatred of all things English. Sadistic henchman presented in uncomfortable, occasionally racist caricature? Look no further than Chagrin, the surgically enhanced Viet Minh torture expert with “the epicanthic lids of the Orient and flat, inert features,” who seems to Bond “not fully alive.” Add to this a harebrained technocratic Cold War scheme to flood Britain with heroin and fake a nuclear attack on Russia, a tennis match early in the novel as gripping as golf with Goldfinger, and a jaunt off to Reza Shah’s Persia. On top of it all, not one but two gorgeous and absurdly named girls—Scarlett and Poppy Papava—who are identical twins. Here, pastiche verges on parody, but Faulks treads the line with surprising success.

Then again, Faulks is terribly awkward when he fails. The novel is set in 1967, after the events of Fleming’s last Bond story, “The Man With the Golden Gun,” and though Faulks’ occasional hints at current events evoke the Cold War, cultural toss-offs to the Rolling Stones (“the ones with the hair down to their shoulders that make such a racket”) and hippiedom (“Bond could smell the bonfire whiff of marijuana he’d previously associated only with souks in the grubbier Moroccan towns”) are as cringeworthy as they come. So are some of his more fantastic characters, like Felix Leiter, equipped with arm and leg prostheses after surviving a shark attack in Thunderball, who spends much of the third act cumbersomely clamoring about Tehran, or the soggy-handshaked homosexual CIA agent who double-crosses our virile hero.

But in this novel, the character that counts—Bond himself—is hugely more human than his current cinematic counterpart. Faulks gives us a Bond at the end of his espionage career, recovering from his wife’s murder, dealing with a recent spell of amnesia, and asking himself if he’s still cut out for the job. At the beginning of the story, Bond is on mandatory sabbatical, considering whether or not to trade in his license to kill for a position as a glorified Moneypenny pushing papers for Her Majesty’s Secret Service. “‘You’re tired,’” Bond says to himself, “‘You’re played out. Finished.’” He subjects himself to a regimen of cold showers, hoping to invigorate the younger agent within. A far cry, and a refreshing one, from the invulnerable berserker on the silver screen. Plus, the little facets and foibles that make Bond—scrambled eggs, cold gin, cigarettes—are included here in abundance.

Unlike the dour plot of “Quantum,” this book’s great flaw is that, as a passable imitation of a middling Bond novel, it is not serious enough. Like most of Fleming’s thrillers, this is Hardy Boys for macho misanthropes: an enjoyable few hours of accelerating action, this time with Faulks’ tongue tucked in cheek. But though Faulks clones Fleming’s feel, he doesn’t quite grok his substance, and as a result, the reader feels misplaced, like the novel’s middle aged Bond watching the flower power world unfold around him.

It’s not Faulks’ fault—Fleming brought something ineffable to Bond in his novels, written, as a friend of mine recently put it, “to work out his penis issues about the Empire.” Today, both the Empire and Fleming’s penis are gone for good—and perhaps the James Bond he created is, too.

The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins
Imperial Life in the Emerald City, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran

I.
“People asked me about the war,” writes New York Times
correspondent Dexter Filkins in the epilogue to “The Forever War,” a
collection of stories drawn from eight years he spent reporting in
Afghanistan and Iraq. “They asked me whether it was as bad as people
said. ‘Oh, definitely,’ I told them, and then, usually, I stopped. In
the beginning, I’d go on a little longer, tell them a story or two, and
I could see their eyes go after a couple of sentences.” After living in
Iraq, Filkins realizes, “I couldn’t have a conversation with anyone who
hadn’t been there about anything at all.”

My eyes went, too, a few pages into the first of his graphic,
grinding vignettes from the front lines. “Vignette” seems too delicate
a word for these stories, in which an Iraqi insurgent’s head bursts
“like a tomato, the deep red of his brainy blood spattering against his
clammy skin,” an American marine’s face is “shredded like hamburger,”
and the beheadings and bombings of occupied Baghdad begin to feel
blasé. But tough as it is to read, my eyes could not help but return:
this book is the best, most terrible and most human account of war in
Iraq and Afghanistan for those of us who will never see it through our
own eyes.

Filkins is a sort of Orwell among the corpses. He reports the
macabre without emotion or bias, as in his
terse description of the
blown-off head of a suicide bomber: “some nicks and cuts and a thin
coating of dust, which gave the skin a yellow hue.” But he also has a
knack for telling, sometimes elegant, detail: “the most curious aspect”
of the same severed head “was the man’s eyebrows: they were raised, as
if in surprise.” It’s these details that set Filkins’ book apart from
his news reporting. Those surprised heads always fall to the ground
intact after a car bombing. The Taliban prefers the Toyota Hi-Lux.
Shiite insurgents are partial to mutilation with power drills while
Sunnis favor beheadings posted to YouTube.

The human details are where his story shines. Many writers have
chronicled the actions of American officials that led to war and the
tribulations of those who have executed it. These dispatches are a
different and much needed history, written in the fog among Afghans and
Iraqis. Here, he records the absurd and tragic and visceral scenes of
life during wartime, and the conversations that accompany them. Indeed,
this is a book about conversation as much as it is about war. Filkins
discovers “two conversations in Iraq, the one the Iraqis were having
with the Americans and the one they were having among themselves.” The
conversation of an ordinary Iraqi “was the chatter of a whole other
world, a parallel reality, which sometimes unfolded right next to the
Americans, even right in front of them. And we almost never saw it.” We
almost never saw Hussein Alawi, the provincial minister working with
the Army to rebuild a dam on the Euphrates who tells Filkins “I take
their money, but I hate them.” We almost never saw General Bassem
al-Gharrawi, commander of a Shiite police brigade who has killed no one
in English and fifty men in Arabic. We almost never saw Ra’ad al-Banna,
the 32-year-old Jordanian who, denied an American visa, drives a gas
tanker into a marketplace in Hilla and incinerates 166 people. We
almost never saw—but for Filkins.

Wonks may be disappointed. This book doesn’t explain the why and
how of the events that it records, or the machinations behind American
policy, but merely describes daily horrors without politics or
pretense. That’s quite enough. Chronology is also hard to follow—dates
are few, and the story isn’t always in order. Still, there is plenty
here to reward War Nerds, from a portrait of chameleon exile Ahmed
Challabi to prescient stories of Afghanistan during the early days of
the Taliban.

All good war correspondents must be a little crazy, and by this
measure, Filkins must be the best. He cheats death several times thanks
to his local comrades—his interpreter saves him from abduction by a
Sunni sheik and his driver pulls him from a savage mob in the aftermath
of a car bombing. He’s nearly killed when embedded with American
troops, too. The story of Lance Corporal William Miller, the marine who
takes a bullet to protect Filkins and his photographer colleague,
climbing a minaret to get a photo of a dead insurgent, is a haunting
and intimate anecdote. But if Filkins was not the kind of guy who
thinks nothing of going for an evening jog along the Tigris in the most
dangerous city in the world, this book would not exist.

Seven years on, it is easy to feel, as Filkins does while bullets
are flying and AC/DC is blaring during the siege of Fallujah, that Iraq
is “not my war, not my army.” There is no military draft to force
self-interest. Press coverage of the wars hovers at a paltry three
percent of all news, crowded out by the election and the economy.
Instead, as Filkins puts it, there is “a kind of underground
conversation about Iraq and Afghanistan…in Pearland and Osawatomie and
LaGrange.” Filkins’ book is a window to that conversation for the rest
of us, who push aside the wars to focus on Christmas shopping and final
exams. We will never know these wars. But at least we can overhear a
bit of the conversation.

II.
There is another conversation in Iraq that Filkins, who
spent most of his time reporting from perilous corners of the war, only
touches on in his book: that of the bureaucrats secluded in Baghdad’s
Green Zone. While Filkins was recording life outside the “Little
America” on the West Bank of the Tigris, The Washington Post’s Rajiv
Chandrasekaran was listening from inside the blast barrier. His book,
“Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” tells the story of the first year
of American occupation, under an American proconsulate led by L. Paul
Bremer.

L. Frank Baum was sometimes more apt, as the title suggests. The
Green Zone was a fantasy world divorced from the reality surrounding
it: “The horns, the gunshots, the muezzin’s call to prayer, never
drifted over the walls. The fear on the faces of American troops was
rarely seen by the denizens of the palace. The acrid smoke of a
detonated car bomb didn’t fill the air. The sub-Saharan privation and
Wild West lawlessness that gripped one of the world’s most ancient
cities swirled around the walls, but on the inside the calm sterility
of an American subdivision prevailed.” Like Filkins, Chandrasekaran’s
book is a series of dispatches from the Green Zone—less gruesome than
the rest of Baghdad, but just as sickening.

Were it not for the suffering outside the walls, these anecdotes
would have a morbid humor. Even so, I stifled the occasional errant
chuckle: if “Forever War” is a tragedy, “Imperial LIfe” is at least a
tragicomedy. The book catalogs the many well-meaning but misguided
projects dreamed up by the idealistic Americans in the Green Zone who
let the Best give no quarter to the good. There’s Jay Hallen, the
twenty-four-year old charged with rebuilding the Baghdad stock
exchange, who resolves “to make it the best, most modern stock market
in the Arab world.” As he schemes to rewrite securities regulationss,
install a computerized trading system, and cut staff, the exchange’s
newly-created governors reopen the market with nothing more than a
couple whiteboards and a few markers. There’s Peter McPherson, who
slashes marginal tax rates from forty-five to fifteen percent—never
mind that most Iraqis never bothered to pay taxes at all. And there’s
Bremer himself, whose zeal to purge senior Baath party members put
“‘fifty thousand Baathists underground before nightfall,’” in the words
of Baghdad’s CIA station chief. Sometimes it is truly ugly. “Who the
fuck are these people?” asks Bernie Kerik, the hero NYPD chief flown to
the Green Zone to advise the government on building a police force.
“Oh, those are Iraqis,” replies an aide.

The details of daily life speak volumes here, too. The
Halliburton-helmed cafeteria offers “a bottomless barrel of pork:
sausage for breakfast, hot dogs for lunch, pork chops for dinner,”
offending the few Iraqis working inside the Green Zone. Staffers read
the “Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Iraq.” Bremer affects a
pair of tan combat boots with a blue suit inside even the seven most
secure square miles in Baghdad.

It’s not all bad—Chandrasekaran conveys genuine respect for those
Americans who did their best with limited resources and a frustrating
bureaucracy, like Steve Browning, the engineer who helps rebuild Iraq’s
electrical infrastructure and Don North, who leads an abortive attempt
to create an independent Iraqi-produced television channel. But their
humble, pragmatic work is outweighed by the hubris of their colleagues.

This Green Zone is now long gone, the proconsul replaced by an
Ambassador and the Republican Party animals replaced with foreign
service officers. Yet its legacy remains. “I don’t know what the guy’s
cause is…I didn’t feel the least bit threatened by it,” said President
Bush this week after an Iraqi reporter pelted him with shoes at a press
conference. Don’t know; not threatened. He was speaking from the very
heart—and soul—of the Green Zone.

Images courtesy of Flickr user MichaelFranks6