Midnight At The War
By Devi S. Laskar
Mariner Books
Midnight At The War takes place in the two years following 9/11 and brings readers into the tumult and tension of that time. The novel brings a new and different perspective to how foreign correspondents on the ground in Iran reported, traveled, and died for truth.
Author Devi Laskar combines crisp writing with a morsel of self-deprecating humor, a dollop of self reflection, and a strong female lead, to deliver a complicated tale that tackles big questions. She calls on her personal experiences to shape the novel. Her time living in the American South and being subjected to brown girl otherism surfaces as she recounts the story of Rita Das. In the 1990s, Laskar worked as a journalist at various news outlets across the U.S. Her skills as a poet, photographer, visual artist, and musician also show up on the page. Laskar is also a mom, an identity Rita faces as she navigates her response to an unplanned pregnancy. Rita must also maneuver through issues of love, grief, and forgiveness in almost all of her significant relationships.
The book opens in March of 2003 with Rita Das telling us about how she approaches travel as a foreign correspondent after 9/11. Rita is married to Sebastian, a steadfast finance nerd who serves as the family anchor as Rita pursues news stories in war-torn countries in the Middle East. She wants to break the next big story even as her mother faces end stage terminal cancer and her father grows more distant. Rita finds herself in the midst of a global crisis when the planes hit the towers as she is trying to make her way home at the behest of her father, husband, and editor. Rita is torn as she flees. She wants to help her driver, Rafiq and his fiancee, two of the many relationships she cultivated while living in what could be any Middle Eastern city as signified by Laskar’s use of a line in place of an actual name. She also wants to get to her mother before she dies. Rita finds herself pondering the nature of forgiveness, identity, and borders on her journey home.
Laskar’s style evokes the writing of Christina Amanpour and other women reporters who risked their lives to elevate stories from war zones. They not only contextualized events but humanized those impacted by them. The style and tone read as reportage. Even as a first-person narrative, the novel has a sense of objectivity, a contemplative distance, as Rita ponders moral dilemmas that could change her life and how she lives it as well as the lives of those she cares about both at home and in the field. The novel successfully uses historical events to frame who Rita is. Laskar uses them to allow Rita to reflect on how gender, race, and class play out for her as a child, young woman and now an adult.
Laskar explores themes of grief, love, and moral dilemmas throughout the novel. Rita is grieving multiple losses. The death of her mother to an extended illness and of close friends, reporters covering events in the Middle East as 9/11 unfolded. These losses force Rita to grapple with the nature of death and grief and how they impact her.
Laskar examines love from numerous angles from eros to philautia and agape love. Rita is entangled in two situationships, one with her husband and the other with a long time lover. Her challenge is deciding which to stick with and which to let go. We all glimpse romantic relationships through several other characters, each of whom must choose how to honor their love. We see Rita struggle to actualize a love of self that will allow her to make the right choices for herself even if it means compromising other relationships. Storge love shows up in her love for her family, but this too is not a straightforward love as we see with the relationship between Rita and her father.
Moral dilemmas abound, from whether or not she should go home to be with her mother in her last days to grappling with how to handle an unexpected pregnancy. Rita faces hard decisions and Laskar does a wonderful job of bringing us into her world and contextualizing their nuances for us.
