If you want to show that war is hell, write a war novel. But if you want to write about the aftermath of war – in particular, the unspectacular day-to-day grind of trying to live with your traumas years after the guns have fallen silent – what genre will best serve your purpose?
Ever since the First World War, for many authors the answer has been: detective fiction. A long line of writers has found that the tropes and excitements of the crime thriller can give impetus to the depiction of the untidy, unrelievable suffering of war veterans. The latest is Kevin Powers, a US Army veteran who saw combat as a machine gunner in Iraq in 2004–5. Powers dramatised his experiences in The Yellow Birds (2012), widely regarded as the best of the war-is-hell novels to have been forged in the Iraq conflict; now, following a less admired excursion into the Civil War era (A Shout in the Ruins, 2018), his third novel, A Line in the Sand, sees him grappling once again with the Iraq War, using the form of the detective thriller to investigate its legacy.
The central character is Arman Bajalan, an Iraqi academic whose decision to work as an interpreter for the American forces saw him denounced as a traitor, narrowly surviving an assassination attempt that left his wife and son dead. He was subsequently granted residency in the US but, otherwise left to fend for himself, has worked for several years as an odd-job man in a seaside motel in Norfolk, Virginia.
Arman’s travails in Iraq have left their mark on his body – “a long time ago, something had meant to carve this man up into pieces” – and no less indelibly on his mind. Powers movingly conveys the permanent miasma of misery in which Arman lives: “He felt a mix of envy and shame… Shame at his survival. Envy of his wife and son for avoiding the emptiness into which he woke each morning.” Arman survives by clinging to a routine, starting each day with a swim in the sea by his workplace.
Yet one morning his life implodes again, when he stumbles on a smartly dressed corpse on the beach. Two local cops – a rookie detective and ex-soldier called Lamar Adams who served in Iraq himself, and his daftly named boss Catherine Wheel – uncover a connection between the dead man and Arman’s past life, and rapidly find themselves forced into a tricky witness protection role alongside their investigation into the murder.
A second storyline centres on journalist Sally Ewell, who, when not driven to drink by grief for her beloved soldier brother killed in Iraq, is investigating the activities of a dodgy private military contractor. Powers’s theme is the long shadow of the Iraq War, not just in terms of the lasting effects on those caught up in it, but also in the sense that it ushered in a new era in which the US government decided it was acceptable to grant carte blanche to private contractors.
This is a tendentious book, but no more so than a great deal of crime fiction, and Powers shows such skill in smoothly blending polemic with intrigue and (often viscerally violent) action that you’d swear he’s an old hand at the thriller genre. The wisecracking Detective Wheel seems somewhat ersatz, however, and Powers’s cops and journos never come to life as vividly as his soldiers did in The Yellow Birds. And although his pacing is perfect, his prose is uneven: he writes beautifully at times, but at others his sentences strain so hard for effect that they dislocate. One suspects this book is testing the water for a series, and if Powers could write a tad less self-consciously, and give less of an impression that Catherine Wheel is working to meet a daily quip quota, it could even be something special.
A Line in the Sand is published by Sceptre at £18.99. To order your copy, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Books