How I ended up choosing humour to write about war

When my book Escape from Baghdad! started getting reviewed some comparisons were with war satires like Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-five. At this point, I’m obligated to mention that those are literary classics and my novel is in no way in the same league. The second point, moreover, is that I didn’t intend to write a war satire. There wasn’t any part of the process where I was like, "today I’m going to go satire writing". That’s mainly because writing satire is difficult. It’s painful to keep up that kind of tone throughout a novel, without sacrificing your characters, or plot, or pacing, or pretty much everything else. Then too, there’s the risk that readers just won’t find it funny, and you’ve gone and wasted 90,000 words on some excruciatingly boring commentary.

Writing humour of any kind is hard, especially doing it deliberately, because this is something that defies planning. So much of it is situational, so much relies on circumstance, that to work it into a novel requires luck. You have to back into it, make it unexpected, almost accidental. It’s the way some of the worst things are actually ripe for humour, like war, or fat people falling into cement mixers.

War is terrible. In some ways we are just learning this. We used to worship war. The Spartans falling at Thermopylae, the Golden horde of Genghis Khan, Napoleon finally going down at Waterloo, all of these were romance stories, glorifying war, making players larger than life, creating something noble and transcendent out of ordinary human conflict.

I love war stories. I’ve always loved them, ever since I was a child. You start off with a heroic lone soldier, fighting for a good cause, facing huge odds, killing oodles of enemies, all of whom are bona fide sadists, even though none of them can apparently shoot worth a damn. Sometimes there’s a girl, but that’s not necessary. Sometimes our hero can go through a moral dilemma, a victim of an overactive conscience, and then we can empathise with him being absolutely torn up, after mowing down a herd of random people. Where are all the good war stories then? Where’s our marine Achilles, our Gulf Hector? How have we ruined such an epic art form? Is American Sniper the best we can come up with?

As I said, I really enjoy war stories. The problem is that somewhere along the way I stopped trusting politicians, even the ones who hadn’t won anything. And then it spread to religious leaders. Then it spread to traffic cops, and detectives, and soldiers and then even talk show hosts. It’s very difficult to enjoy a war story when you’re being spoon fed a puerile message. You see a good war story requires suspension of disbelief. Our problem is that we are in a perpetual state of disbelief, where thousands of people are being slaughtered in front of live cameras, millions displaced, in wars where the media shoves nonsensical narratives down our throats.

We don’t have war stories because we got the internet. And imbedded reporters. And bloggers. And endless coverage of refugees. We got the gulf wars, petty conflicts between money grubbing leaders, with endless and horrific civilian casualties. All of a sudden, romance novels about war seem trite and naïve. It’s not possible to construct a good versus evil narrative anymore, because the combatants seem insane, fighting over a pack of lies, their leaders spewing propaganda, while the real story on television, in glaring HD is the death and suffering of civilians, over and over, the same thing on repeat until it bludgeons you senseless. No staged story, no excuse can be worth that deluge. And if the worst is true, if our sneaking certainties are correct that all of these lives are being thrown away ultimately for profit, for the padding of corporate accounts, then the least we can do is have a good laugh, because the joke’s really on us.

Humour seems to be a perfect response. It’s so sad it’s got to be funny.