June 2005


A first step on the road to recovery

COWARDS invite contempt, as easy targets for bullies, sneers and jeers from others. Cowards, especially naive cowards, can be difficult to get to like.

Chris Ayres is painfully honest about his own cowardice, yet aspects of his account of how his early years in business journalism with The Times, first in London, then New York in September 2001, and finally Los Angeles are unsettling.

At 30, Ayres is still a young man. He is a child of Thatcher, an unquestioning product of the 1970s, cosseted in the comfort unique to that generation. War was more distant for that generation than for any of their predecessors. Korea and Vietnam had moved from newspapers to history books. Thatcher's military adventure in the Falkland Islands might have captured the imaginations of some seven- or eight-year-olds.

'Gulf War I' in the early 1990s may have entered teenage consciousness, but for many it was the repeat, 10 years later, and the hypocrisy of US politicians which has provided the introduction to the true, pure, tragedy of war.

Ayres' narrative bears this out. Perhaps that is why this feels indulgently self-analytical at times. He does not deny his shallowness; a naive acceptance of much of Thatcher's philosophy is also apparent.

Fixations
Ayres washing more personal laundry in public than clothing in private. Psychologists should find untold delights in the revelations.

Fixations run through the text. The man who ignores Pentagon instructions to take only one set of underwear reveals that he takes 20 pairs of Calvin Klein boxers; one of which, he later, confesses, is worn for at least four days as he moves into Iraq in a US Army Humvee.

Ayres does have a good turn of phrase. He is observant. His tale is well-told, and once ensconced in the Middle East, the naivity quickly disappears.

'War isn't,' he writes, 'rock'n'roll. It's got nothing to do with Jimi Hendrix or Richard Wagner. War is nursery rhymes and early Madonna. War is the music from your childhood.'

Are comparisons with Evelyn Waugh's 'Scoop' out of place? Others have already noted parallels with Waugh's novel about the bird-watcher who writes a newspapers' 'nature notes' being assigned, in error, to a war in East Africa in the 1930s.

Ayres, in telling his own tale, could be sealing a celebrity future that sets him up for life.

Retiring to celebrity?
Will Ayres still be working as a journalist, and reporting from war zones in his 80s? Bill Deedes, suspected by many to be the inspiration for Waugh's hero Henry Boot, does.

Or will he retire to write other books? To highly-paid after-dinner speeches? To lecture in journalism? Or to be part of the celebrity circuit in the LA he clearly enjoys?

LA, if it complies with its stereotypical portrayal, will adore the approach; it feels so much like a journal written for a counsellor or psychotherapist that LA's shrink junkies should feel a natural affinity with Ayres and his experiences.

Undoubtedly, Chris Ayres' name is more widely known. More people see the covers piled up in Waterstones, Blackwells and Borders than see nine point bylines on page 16 of the London Times.

It also feels like a book that need to be written, but which should have been left to mature for a few years, for its author to have gained the perspective of age necessary to put the self-discovery into context.

Collective interviews - rushed into print as Embedded; the media at war in Iraq - an oral history, Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson within five months of the start of the military action - provide equal illumination of the naivity of one generation of journalists. Having a book to himself allows Chris Ayres greater indulgence.

His account is a romp; it is easy to read and engaging, yet it feels as if the healing is not complete. The end of one relationship is dealt with, almost cursorily, in one sentence. The introduction of her successor, Ayres' fiancee, seems too quick, as it he is predictably rebounding. Aspects of his feelings towards his parents are introduced, but not resolved.

Ayres' acknowledges colleaques' generosity, but, turning the last page, there is the feeling that while writing may have been the start of a psycho-therapeutic return to Beverly Hills, friends, colleagues and employers should still bear his mental health in mind.