We Are Now Beginning Our Descent: A Novel

By James Meek

James Meek’s masterful historical novel, The People’s Act of Love received accolades around the world, earning Meek comparisons to Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Conrad, and Greene. We Are Now Beginning Our Descent is a tour de force of storytelling, furthering his reputation as one of the most exciting and original young novelists writing today.
Adam Kellas, a British journalist, would-be thriller novelist, and failed lover meets Astrid Walsh, a self-possessed, hard-charging reporter while the two are covering allied military operations in the Afghan mountains. After sharing one passionate night in a watchtower near a defunct airfield, Astrid disappears from Kellas’s life.
A year later, following a disastrous dinner party in London during which he destroys his few remaining friendships, Kellas receives a short, beseeching e-mail and hastily embarks on a trans-Atlantic journey to a small town near the Chesapeake Bay where he believes Astrid waits for him. Kellas envisions the fresh start that his new life with Astrid might offer, unaware that she may be harboring unsettling secrets of her own.
A passionate, incisive novel, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent lays bare the entwined hypocrisies, foibles, and desires of our age, and is a testament to the obsessive pull of love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Canongate U.S.
• Release date: Mar 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9780802192011

James Meek

JAMES MEEK is the author of four novels, including The People’s Act of Love, which won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the SAC Book of the Year Award, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His novel We Are Now Beginning Our Descent won the Prince Maurice Prize. Meek worked as a reporter in Russia and Ukraine in the 1990s, and later his reporting from Iraq and about Guantánamo Bay won a number of international awards. He now lives in London.

Reviews for We Are Now Beginning Our Descent

[shelfmonkey · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The events and effects of September 11 have proved endless fodder for non-fiction books and documentaries, but their impact on the world of fiction has taken longer to be felt. Lately a few movies such as Lions for Lambs and Rendition have dared to tentatively poke their heads out at the box office and comment on the state of the ‘war on terror’, but have by and large been greeted with apathy, and quickly forgotten.Luckily, literature often gets a pass where cinema fears to tread, and opportunities to understand the war from alternative perspectives have begun to make themselves heard. Authors such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Jess Walter, and Don DeLillo have recently taken bold steps forward in using the events as a backdrop for intelligent examinations of the world as it now functions.Latest to employ the aftermath of 9/11 as a literary device is British novelist James Meek, author of the critically-lauded The People’s Act of Love. Meek may be in a better position to comment on such issues than most; in addition to his sterling work as a novelist, he worked as a reporter in Afghanistan, and in 2004 was named Foreign Correspondent and Amnesty Journalist of the Year for his reporting on Iraq and Guantánamo Bay.As such, the Afghanistan scenes in his new novel We Are Now Beginning Our Descent have the sting of authenticity. As his protagonist Kellas traverses through a war “scripted for an audience that knew as much about orcs and Sauron as it did about Iraqis and Saddam,” the moral quagmire of this new war has rarely felt more personal.Far more than a blasted landscape travelogue, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (a nicely ominous title) is a manic cry for truth in a world that has lost its moral bearings. And as Kellas undergoes a tragicomic mid-life crisis that takes him from Afghanistan to England to the U.S., it becomes readily apparent that truth is, and always has been, a nebulous and wholey subjective quality.Kellas is a dispirited British war correspondent whose belief system has been sorely tested by the new warfare he is sent out to cover. Unlike the honourable reporting he once offered, Kellas was now forcibly compelled to take part in “a greater story, a baton-twirling lit-up marching parade of a story that belonged to a mighty nation of storytellers, mythmakers and newscryers, America, but which other, foreign storytellers might attach themselves to.”Kellas himself is no saint, himself having written a superficial military thriller with the sole intent of making money, and is finding himself less and less capable of functioning without an ethical compass. And when a strange email arrives from Astrid, an American reporter he once knew, Kellas’ finds himself completely adrift, with Astrid the only lifeline he can see.Through Kellas, Meek is interested in the search for the truth that underlies the fiction of our lives. We have become a society of surface, he implies, more content to watch and comment than actually participate. “There was a cult of seeing without knowing and watching without touching,” Kellas notes about society’s understanding of the war, but this concept can be stretched over all aspects of modern life. The world has become enamoured with the superficial, the soundbite and the 30-second newspiece, preventing empathy and halting any hope of understanding one another, either in the arena of war or the domestic field of interpersonal relationships.In an inspired scene of black comedic rage, Kellas rails at a dinner party hosted by liberal commentators who have never set foot outside their country, a scene as notable for its pointed observations as it is for the undercurrent of self-loathing that permeates Kellas’ every action. Meek’s novel is ostensibly about war, but as Kellas staggers from one set piece to another, Meek slowly unveils a quietly complicated love story, hinting that misunderstandings between countries are no more or less complicated than those of individuals.Meek has a wonderfully sardonic way with words, exemplified in Kellas’ first reactions to the U.S.: “For foreigners arriving here, America was a marvel harder to believe, infinitely more wondrous: a real version of a notorious fake…[like] a long-lens paparazzi shot of Jesus on the beach, paler, flabbier, shorter, with less holy eyes than the icons had it, staggeringly real.”However, as Meek throws Kellas about from one soul-shattering experience to another, it is hard to maintain a sense of believability about Descent as a whole. Kellas is a brilliant character, but his travails function better as separate stories than as a whole novel. There is a sense of incompleteness to Meek’s tale, which indeed may have been his ultimate point, that there is no ending to life’s miseries, but it causes subtle harm to the story.We Are Now Beginning Our Descent may not be wholly successful, but it is always compelling, entertaining, and thought-provoking. Meek keeps a sure hand on the wheel, and while it may drift at times, the trip itself is worth taking.

[vguy_6 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Another dud. Unappealing macho writer character in orbit in the Middle East. Much jumping around in time sequences which confuses poor little me who likes a narrative. Ridiculous amount of detail on insignificant matters, e.g. how many bandages are available in Boots at the airport (it's a pharmacy, for God's sake!. When one of the other unappealing characters tells a shaggy-dog story, I started to feel the whole book was a shaggy-dog story, and stopped reading.

[chazzw_2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

As Bush’s deux ex machina foreign policy careens off into the ditch of history, James Meek comes with this vision of Afghanistan and Iraq. British journalist (and would be novelist) Adam Kellas covers the wars (first Afghanistan and later, Iraq) with a uneasy feeling that by his very presence, he’s somehow a part of the effort. The discipline of dispassionate observation and resolve that the reporter is supposed to represent, mirrors in an uncanny way the distance and aseptic way in which the West wishes to wage war on the Third World.Funny…on the news tonight..I emphasize the news, there was NBC war correspondent Richard Engel - who I generally like - given the opportunity to plug his book about his five years in Iraq. Odd juxtaposition as I was settling down to read the last 50 pages of Meek’s book.But it just doesn’t work that way. Hands get dirty. Lives - beyond the proclamation of victory - get abused and lost. Sacrificed, we call it. So there’s the grand scheme. As an outline, I dig it. In execution, something is lost. Which is not to say that Meek cannot or does not write a great sentence. It’s just that too many of them get away from him. A number of times I appreciated the art of a sentence, and upon backtracking to read again, wondered….really…just what it meant. The there was sometimes not there.Novelist Meek has also spent time as a war correspondent, so he comes at all this from a perspective of experience. All that shows, from the scenes of covering the wars, to Kellas’ working with his publishers - the constant internal argument on art vs commerce. There are many details here that can only have come from actual experiences. It makes for good reading.The other night, I was listening to some discussion of Bush’s deep longing to make his mark as a war leader for the sake of posterity. I was reminded of how true that sounded with this remarkable passage toward the end of Meek’s ambitious but flawed book. An unnecessary war where the only victims were volunteers or foreigners was the last luxury of a society that could not accept it had more money than it knew how to console itself with. It was an attempt to buy seriousness with other people’s blood; to taste the words of high tragedy in your mouth, and savour your own doom and hubris, yet skip aside at the last minute and let a spear-carrier take the knife your flaws had summoned for you.