Alexander Stuart: The War Zone: 20th Anniversary Edition

I still remember the Friday afternoon in London when I really started writing The War Zone , when I found the “voice” for the novel – Tom’s voice – and knew that I had finally worked my way into it.

The fact that that afternoon is now well over twenty years ago is as stunning to me as the passage of time is to anyone else – especially anyone with children.

The War Zone has been a huge part of my life, in part because of the novel’s reception and the fact that it was turned into a film with a life of its own, but also – very significantly – because it is irretrievably bound up for me with the birth, five years of life, and sad (but ultimately, in the most spiritual way possible, acceptable) death from cancer of my first son, Joe Buffalo Stuart.

When I started the book, I knew only that I wanted to write about family and about the startling power of the relationships we have with our parents and our children. I loved my parents deeply, but I also enjoyed, if that is the word, the inevitable period of adolescent fury directed both at them and at society in general, most particularly in the form of my school, Bexley Grammar (the British equivalent of a high school) – although I now recognize that it, and more especially my wonderful parents and younger sister, Lynne, helped make me who I am today.

That The War Zone turned into an intense, dark novel about adolescent and parental morality, incest and abuse, is still in part a mystery to me. I knew early on that, although my first child was to be a boy, I wanted to write about the intensity of father-daughter relationships, and through talking to women friends about their relationships with their fathers and other male relatives, I “stumbled” onto incest and abuse as a subject.

I knew that I wanted to tell the story through an adolescent boy’s eyes, because still, at the time of writing the novel, and even now occasionally, I can revisit the energy and sense of revolt I felt at fourteen or sixteen at the injustices of the world.

And then there is the role that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her government played in influencing the novel: not a small one, because I loathed the entire “vision” of society that she, and in the US, President Ronald Reagan, presented – a sense that people were on their own, and had to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.”

I have always loved America and its energy, and perhaps Thatcher thought she brought something of that energy to 1980s Britain, but both she and Reagan to me represented all the hypocrisy and callousness of an approach to society that is and was uncaring and utterly lacking in empathy.

And empathy is, I believe, the single most important quality that we as human beings possess, and certainly the one that my wife, Charong Chow, and I most wish to instill in our two young children now.

All of these elements combined to drive me to write a book that is full of passion and anger and the ultimate crime an adult can commit, beyond murder: abusing a child, particularly his or her own child.

If Jessie, the teenage victim in the book, comes dangerously close at times to appearing to be the instigator of events, that was a deliberate decision, prompted in no small measure by a popular belief among some misogynistic male judges at the time (and still) that women invite their own rape and abuse.

I wanted to push the envelope, to create a character who was mysteriously damaged, but who also appeared to be almost a force of nature, certainly to her younger brother, Tom.

And perhaps the most perfect gratification I received, in terms of anyone “understanding” the novel, was when, having written to him out of the blue in Switzerland, where he then lived (I obtained his address by calling his London agent, who astonishingly provided it to me), I received this letter, typed by hand on a scrap of paper, from Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange and so many other great novels, on August 11 th, 1988:

“ Dear Mr Stuart,

I apologize for being so late with a comment on THE WAR ZONE, but, as you can guess, I’ve been busy with other things and reserved reading your book till night when, tortured by mosquitoes and gnats, I wouldn’t get much sleep anyway. The book certainly kept me awake apart from those. I don’t know what kind of a comment your US publishers want, and I may, of course, have misunderstood the work entirely, but try this:

This is a pungent shocking book, superbly written (sharp, sensuous, bitter) which, from the viewpoint of one of the more intelligent adolescents of Thatcher’s England, presents the theme of incest not as a device of sexual titillation but as a symbol of social breakdown. I was horrified but seduced from first to last. The writing is remarkable.

Something like that, anyway. Congratulations and every good wish from

My decision to turn this 20 thAnniversary Edition of The War Zone into a fully revised and updated version of the book was not made lightly.

When I started reviewing and checking the text for republication, I realized that while I had no desire to tamper with the core of the novel, neither its characters nor its plot, certain of the details that located it in the time period of the late 1980s were remarkably similar to the equally horrific (if not more so) political epoch from which we are hopefully now emerging: the Bush (and in Britain, to a slightly less devastating extent, the Blair) Years.

I believe George W Bush, Dick Cheney et al to be the most callous, cruel and – if I used the word, which I try not to – evil leaders the United States has ever known; and British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s decision to support them in their illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq to be completely unforgivable.

Politics and warfare may seem some distance removed from the subject of family and incest, but I do not believe that they are.

We are all moral beings, not always good ones, but every breath we take and every act that we perform from the age when we are conscious of the consequences of our actions, is a moral one.

Invading a country (while subjecting it to devastation from the air disgustingly tagged, “Shock and Awe”) and lying to the world about your reasons for doing so, are in the same moral realm as abusing your daughter.

Both are cruel, heartless acts that you justify to yourself with some kind of twisted reasoning.

What’s more, the moral climate created by the kind of politics that Bush and Thatcher practiced is precisely that which leads to dishonesty in every sense: gross dishonesty and greed on Wall Street and elsewhere, as we have seen, and gross dishonesty at every level of society.

Because of this, I chose to update certain relatively minor references in this new edition of The War Zone , so that it could be read as if written now. I shall be very interested to see what reaction that decision draws.

To end this introduction on a lighter and more hopeful note, let me say that my own life is as far removed from the darkness and despair I experienced while writing the novel as it is possible to be.

My wife, Charong, and I have two beautiful young children, one of whom, our baby daughter, I helped Charong deliver without assistance (because our midwife could not reach us in time) in the bathroom of our house in Topanga Canyon, Los Angeles, on New Year’s Day, 2009.