Being Engaged: The War Correspondent in British Fiction

Abstract

Live satellite reporting has made war correspondents immediately visible as actors in the theatre of war, and despite the alleged techno and video nature of recent conflicts, the war reporter as a personal mediator of war has not become obsolete. As audiences are flooded with images of war, the correspondent appears to gain particular importance precisely because of his or her humanity. Fiction, and particularly literary fiction, has the best potential to show this humanity and to explore what the reporter's engagement may mean in human terms. As a matter of fact, it has done so since the profession came into being in the middle of the nineteenth century. The novels to be discussed, Rudyard Kipling's The Light That Failed (1891), Graham Greene's The Quiet American (1955) and Pat Barker's Double Vision (2003), all emerge from the British context, i. e. a background with a long and important tradition of war reporting since the famous William Russell of The Times, and a context in which enduring myths about the profession originate.