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War, for all its downsides, makes for interesting times, not to mention interesting reading material. After all, Wilfred Owen’s “subject” was “war, and the pity of war”.

In War Zones the reader is provided an imaginative tour through areas affected by conflicts.

The ‘usual’ zones find a place.Wendell Steavenson, in ‘Victory in Lebanon’ brings out the various ironies that war throws up—including a Hezbollah supporter offering the writer an Israeli cigarette and the terrible epigraph: ‘Without this faith, all fighting would be suicide.”

A similar absurdist appeal to war is cited by Guy Tillim in his photo-feature, ‘Congo’. In one colour picture, the eye immediately locks on to a woman perched above an agitated crowd in a festive costume, making the scene look like a Mardi Gras—until one notices that below her, the supporters of Jean-Pierre Bemba, one of the protagonists of the civil war in Congo, are getting ready for
something less festive.

That war zones share a ‘taste’ is evident as we read Marione Ingram’s ‘Operation Gomorrah’ and then to ‘Tokyo War Zero’ by David Peace. The former recounts the summer of 1943 in Hamburg surrounded and drenched by explosions. “‘The
Bolshevik Jews are behind this!’ a hoarse voice growled. ‘They sold us out. They told the English where to bomb.’ I found the idea exciting, but Mother said it was ridiculous”, writes Ingram. In ‘Tokyo War Zero’, it is 1941 Japan where the rage is directed against Koreans, Peace describing in Manga-like violence a decapitation and a live burial.

This book is not so much about wars themselves but where they leave their tell-talemarks, human minds included.

This is a world under extreme stress turning citizens into conspirators, moral humans into humans who suddenly know the meaning of life at the cost of morality. It is when different rules apply, as in when in Tahmina Anam’s wonderfully evocative and disturbing ‘The Courthouse’, a character says in that “almost-city” Dhaka, “I don’t care what anyone says...Authority is what we need.”