Jon Steele: War Junkie

By DAVID HILL

Meet the sort of book that sends publicists into puffery. It is "gut-wrenching", "adrenaline-packed", "rivers of blood", and so on. The author left home at 16 ... he lives with a stray cat named Killer. Oh dear.

The story of TV cameraman Steele starts with his cracking up from the horrors he has seen. He cracks up at Heathrow, where we hear how beastly his father was and how barren his relationships are.

Then there are flashbacks to a decade of death, destruction, disintegration. Steele flies with foaming Georgians into civil war; watches Russian militia trample protesters; rides the Trans-Siberian with Natasha and her lethal grey eyes.

In Rwanda, he films machetes gleaming in the sun, bodies rotting in the open, as Hutu militia rampage.

Then we cross to Sarajevo, where he can't handle the sight of a shot child, and where he hangs out the windows of the Holiday Inn, screaming abuse at Serb snipers.

The guy has lived a remarkable life. Unfortunately, this doesn't guarantee a remarkable book, and War Junkie spends much of its time being a turgid mess. There are terrifying tales in here, but most of them sink in sloughs of self-indulgence.

Steele has one volume-setting (crescendo) and one accelerator-setting (overdrive). He flogs his writing with every trick he should never have learned - one-word paragraphs, deliberately skewed grammar, hairy-chested dialogue, multi-lingual obscenities.

He is fascinated by those he meets, and by their fascination with him. Every soldier in every Army in the world wants his picture taken as he marches off.

Yet he doesn't like people much, whether they're fat-assed tourists, Aeroflot hostesses, two-star generals or elderly Hutu. Reading his accounts of humanity's inhumanity, you understand the misanthropy, but it doesn't help the book.

I'm sure Steele writes with total authenticity. He also writes with near-total arrogance. He's been there and filmed that. His readers presumably haven't, so he hits them over the head for 400 pages. His editors should lose their performance bonuses.

Just occasionally, as he writes about war's effects on civilians, a better book shows through.

When little Marina dies in Serbia, or mutilated kids sing in a Rwandan hospital, Steele briefly forgets his posturing prose and writes quietly, poignantly. The result then is unforgettable.

Bantam

$37.95