The War Zone

I still remember the Friday afternoon in London when I really started writing
The War Zone
, when I found the “voice” for the novel—Tom’s voice—and knew that I had finally worked my way into it.

The fact that that afternoon is now well over twenty years ago is as stunning to me as the passage of time is to anyone else—especially anyone with children.

The War Zone
has been a huge part of my life, in part because of the novel’s reception and the fact that it was turned into a film with a life of its own, but also—very significantly—because it is irretrievably bound up for me with the birth, five years of life, and sad (but ultimately, in the most spiritual way possible, acceptable) death from cancer of my first son, Joe Buffalo Stuart.

When I started the book, I knew only that I wanted to write about family and about the startling power of the relationships we have with our parents and our children. I loved my parents deeply, but I also enjoyed, if that is the word, the inevitable period of adolescent fury directed both at them and at society in general, most particularly in the form of my school, Bexley Grammar (the British equivalent of a high school)—although I now recognize that it, and more especially my wonderful parents and younger sister, Lynne, helped make me who I am today.

That
The War
Zone turned into an intense, dark novel about adolescent and parental morality, incest and abuse, is still in part a mystery to me. I knew early on that, although my first child was to be a boy, I wanted to write about the intensity of father-daughter relationships, and through talking to women friends about their relationships with their fathers and other male relatives, I “stumbled” onto incest and abuse as a subject.

I knew that I wanted to tell the story through an adolescent boy’s eyes, because still, at the time of writing the novel, and even now occasionally, I can revisit the energy and sense of revolt I felt at fourteen or sixteen at the injustices of the world.

And then there is the role that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her government played in influencing the novel: not a small one, because I loathed the entire “vision” of society that she, and in the US, President Ronald Reagan, presented—a sense that people were on their own, and had to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.”

I have always loved America and its energy, and perhaps Thatcher thought she brought something of that energy to 1980s Britain, but both she and Reagan to me represented all the hypocrisy and callousness of an approach to society that is and was uncaring and utterly lacking in empathy.

And empathy is, I believe, the single most important quality that we as human beings possess, and certainly the one that my wife, Charong Chow, and I most wish to instill in our two young children now.

All of these elements combined to drive me to write a book that is full of passion and anger and the ultimate crime an adult can commit, beyond murder: abusing a child, particularly his or her own child.

If Jessie, the teenage victim in the book, comes dangerously close at times to appearing to be the instigator of events, that was a deliberate decision, prompted in no small measure by a popular belief among some misogynistic male judges at the time (and still) that women invite their own rape and abuse.

I wanted to push the envelope, to create a character who was mysteriously damaged, but who also appeared to be almost a force of nature, certainly to her younger brother, Tom.

And perhaps the most perfect gratification I received, in terms of anyone “understanding” the novel, was when, having written to him out of the blue in Switzerland, where he then lived (I obtained his address by calling his London agent, who astonishingly provided it to me), I received this letter, typed by hand on a scrap of paper, from Anthony Burgess, the author of
A Clockwork Orange
and so many other great novels, on August 11
^th
, 1988:

“
Dear Mr Stuart,

I apologize for being so late with a comment on THE WAR ZONE, but, as you can guess, I’ve been busy with other things and reserved reading your book till night when, tortured by mosquitoes and gnats, I wouldn’t get much sleep anyway. The book certainly kept me awake apart from those. I don’t know what kind of a comment your US publishers want, and I may, of course, have misunderstood the work entirely, but try this:

This is a pungent shocking book, superbly written (sharp, sensuous, bitter) which, from the viewpoint of one of the more intelligent adolescents of Thatcher’s England, presents the theme of incest not as a device of sexual titillation but as a symbol of social breakdown. I was horrified but seduced from first to last. The writing is remarkable.

Something like that, anyway. Congratulations and every good wish from Sincerely AnthonyBurgess”

My decision to turn this 20
^th
Anniversary Edition of
The War Zone
into a fully revised and updated version of the book was not made lightly.

When I started reviewing and checking the text for republication, I realized that while I had no desire to tamper with the core of the novel, neither its characters nor its plot, certain of the details that located it in the time period of the late 1980s were remarkably similar to the equally horrific (if not more so) political epoch from which we are hopefully now emerging: the Bush (and in Britain, to a slightly less devastating extent, the Blair) Years.

I believe George W Bush, Dick Cheney
et al
to be the most callous, cruel and—if I used the word, which I try not to—evil leaders the United States has ever known; and British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s decision to support them in their illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq to be completely unforgivable.

Politics and warfare may seem some distance removed from the subject of family and incest, but I do not believe that they are. We are all moral beings, not always good ones, but every breath we take and every act that we perform from the age when we are conscious of the consequences of our actions, is a moral one. Invading a country (while subjecting it to devastation from the air disgustingly tagged, “Shock and Awe”) and lying to the world about your reasons for doing so, are in the same moral realm as abusing your daughter. Both are cruel, heartless acts that you justify to yourself with some kind of twisted reasoning.

What’s more, the moral climate created by the kind of politics that Bush and Thatcher practiced is precisely that which leads to dishonesty in every sense: gross dishonesty and greed on Wall Street and elsewhere, as we have seen, and gross dishonesty at every level of society.

Because of this, I chose to update certain relatively minor references in this new edition of
The War Zone
, so that it could be read as if written now. I shall be very interested to see what reaction that decision draws.

To end this introduction on a lighter and more hopeful note, let me say that my own life is as far removed from the darkness and despair I experienced while writing the novel as it is possible to be.

My wife, Charong, and I have two beautiful young children, one of whom, our baby daughter, I helped Charong deliver without assistance (because our midwife could not reach us in time) in the bathroom of our house in Topanga Canyon, Los Angeles, on New Year’s Day, 2009.

So, in an instance of life reflecting art, I have now experienced (without the car crash, thankfully) something of what my fictional family in
The War Zone
experience at the beginning of the novel.

I learned that you definitely should not cut the umbilical cord until a qualified medical professional is present—but I hope that, over the years, I have learned much else besides.

Alexander Stuart

Los Angeles May 2009

Two pictures of England: I know which one I’d choose.

North London. The Harrow Road. I’ve cycled up here from the poncy foreign calm of Bayswater. Two black kids have just tossed a woman’s shopping bag off a bus, then jumped after it. They don’t want what’s in it, they just don’t want anything to stand still.

A plastic carton of eggs hits the pavement near the relics of a second-hand furniture shop. Squeeze-wrapped sausages vanish under a car tire. My bike scrunches across a box of cornflakes and one of the kids chucks a loaf of bread at my face. It’s amazing, the punch sliced white can carry.

‘Fuck off!’ I shout. ‘Fuck you, Maurice!’ the other kid yells, making the name sound French and faggoty. A ketchup bottle buzzes past my ear and smashes in the road. ‘Maurice?’ I wonder. I pedal harder as both of them come after me, one on the pavement, the other dodging the traffic to try and catch hold of my rear mudguard. I turn two corners and wheel down a street pitted with ruts and pot holes, then slide through a piss-smelling alley between dark houses and come out on waste ground. The boys will find me if they want to, but I don’t think they’re that motivated. I take a breather and stare out over the view, my pulse racing. Through a wire fence and down an embankment, railway tracks stretch into the distance. A single line curls off at one point into a shed half buried by the shadow of the road bridge. Nearby, the gravel under the sleepers is stained with rust, a color you don’t see much of in Bayswater. I’m on high ground and the land dips away from me across the tracks, toward the poky back gardens of terraced houses. Their scraggly lawns and washing lines edge on to a dumping ground littered with rotting mattresses, a wrecked pushchair, black rubbish sacks, the scarred remains of a fire. Above all this hangs a big expanse of sky, blood red where it touches the backbone of the houses, spilling out overhead into a great, glowing fishtank of orange and blue. London is wonderful, I love it. It’s alive, spreading out before me, old and new, humming like the railway track, telling me everything’s great, I can do anything here—if only we weren’t moving next week.

Picture Number Two. Devon. The English countryside, as green and untouched as you can get it. Well, at least Devon has some balls. It’s a little bit wild, not all afternoon tea and morons who actually believe what they hear on BBC radio. But it’s not the city.

We are on the river, Dad, Jessica and me, piled into a canoe. We’ve had no sleep. Our new baby brother has just been born this morning, and we are celebrating. At least, I think that’s what we’re doing. I, for one, am so wired by the night and the incredible sunshine we’re having and by what happened to the car that the details tend to be a little blurry. Of course, it could be the wine. Dad brought a bottle of wine, so he had no option but to share it with us.

What did happen with the car? When we left it wherever we left it, its nose was all punched in, like a prizefighter down on his luck. Did that happen before the baby was born or after? I’m not sure. The last twenty-four hours seem to have got all twisted, so that today still feels like yesterday and the football match I watched on TV last night when we were all so restless might have been this morning after the birth but before this drunken cavort on the river.

Actually, I’ve had very little of the wine. Dad and Jessie polished off most of the bottle. It always tastes like petrol to me, but I love the burn in the stomach, the buzz in the head.

We are drifting under a bridge now, using a paddle to avoid scraping against the moldy brickwork on one side. The air down here is dark and dank and cooler than in the sun—it’s a different atmosphere, a place where bats and water rats hang out.

As we emerge back into the light, a hail of small pebbles hits the water around the canoe, thrown by three kids, a little older than me, a little younger than Jessie. They whistle and shout at her, not bothered by Dad’s presence, asking if she isn’t too hot in her bikini. They seem very keen to draw her attention to something on the water, one of them curving a cigarette packet through the air to splash down close to the object in question. I stare at it, puzzled at first by what looks like an old surgical glove—or a monkey’s bulbous arse at the zoo. Then I realize the truth: it’s a condom, swollen with water (and milk or something, I don’t want to know) and tied like a balloon. Jessica smiles darkly and looks back at the boys, insects all, waving and jeering. They haven’t a clue. They haven’t a clue what they would be tangling with if they tangled with my sister.

This is the picture I’m stuck with, then: Devon, tranquil Devon, the Devon we have moved to, maybe not as tranquil as it used to be, but too bloody tranquil for me. Rubbers in the river are nothing—I want the scum of London, turds in the doorways, the stench of telephone kiosks, the heat from a burning car. London looks beautiful with all that stuff. Everything’s falling apart, but still the city has splendor. The country, well, the country doesn’t know what to do with itself any more. It doesn’t even know how to be healthy: the water we’re paddling through must be thick with invisible pollution, radioactive fallout and yet—

And yet Jessica has just slipped out of the canoe to swim in that muck. It’s clear enough, even the green and slimy weed three feet down is visible, but it feels too warm to me. English water is never warm, not outside, not without the help of some factory somewhere, pumping out hot waste—or a minor cockup at the nearest reactor. But there’s no time to think such thoughts. Something else is happening, something I can’t put my finger on but which leaves me feeling disturbed. Perhaps I’m just tired, confused, heat-hazed?