JOIN USThe Gun Room
Georgina Harding
Bloomsbury
2016, pp 211, Rs 499
The Gun Room, Georgina Harding’s latest offering, grabs you by the throat from the first few pages.
It begins during the Vietnam War, and is told from the perspective of a young freelance photographer, Jonathan Ashe, from Norfolk, England. He is waiting for a chance to photograph the death and destruction in the green, war-torn paddy fields. A chance encounter with a helicopter pilot in a Saigon bar one evening gets the photographer a lucky break.
Ashe accompanies the pilot on a chopper run into the combat zone and captures images that leave a searing impression on him. This is in the days of the roll film. The description of photographing an American soldier sitting with his back against a wall, absolutely still, while a village is burning ahead, leaves a haunting impression on the photographer and the reader.
The photos need to be shot within minutes while the chopper waits, rotors ready to whirl for a quick take-off. The urgency gets to you, and you find yourself holding your breath.
“Beyond the soldier, the village. The houses were burning... through that smoke, villagers and soldiers, and small scared black pigs like squealing demons at their feet. Everything seemed to continue in motion though the cause of the motion was past. Even the dead, when he came to them, seemed to be caught in the act of moving. An old man running to catch... his hat... A boy and a dog tumbled over one another as if in play... He took these pictures and he took others...” The photographer is moving through the village, all thoughts emptied, not hearing anything except that photos have to be quickly taken, the predictable as well as the ethereal, for they are disappearing with every passing moment. While that mad, painful urgency comes leaping out of the pages, the images don’t go away. And with them, the hopelessness and futility of war and avoidable deaths stay like a shadow throughout the book.
Harding’s writing, with that slight twist in the formation of her sentences, did leave me reading some lines again and again. For example, “...he had expected to dodge, but there was nothing to dodge, only a line to walk towards the centre of the smoke and the sound, to where the shooting must so short a time before have taken place...”
Ashe’s photograph of the soldier becomes famous in Vietnam and across the world. A cheque he receives for the pictures is enough for him to settle down in Tokyo, Japan. He first stays in a hotel, but realising the need to stretch out his resources, he takes a small house on rent from an American, Laura, who leaves to India in search of her guru. Ashe house-sits for her, as it were.
He takes on teaching English to the Japanese, which is what Laura had been doing to support herself. He meets Kumiko, a Japanese woman who is part of the same team that teaches English to the locals. This meeting takes the tale into other directions, with interesting twists and turns, but always centres on images of both black-and-white and colour photographs, and of real life.
Ashe has also kept in touch with his mother in England during the months he has been travelling the world. (Through the wonderful overseas arrangement of getting letters to a poste restante address!) The letters add yet another dimension to the book — the nostalgic flashbacks of growing up on their Norfolk farm — and many accounts here leave a lump in the throat. You can almost smell the dankness on their childhood pet-dog’s coat. But the most dramatic moments of the book hurtle back to the photographed American soldier.
To say anything more would be a spoiler. Suffice to say that for Ashe, it becomes a question of staying sane, and about reconciling himself to the memories of the photo and many other things. How deftly the author has woven the threads of the tale to form the final fabric — a very haunting story.