Lara Marlowe has written a beautiful, brave and honest book about the terrible wars she and Robert Fisk covered and their marriage and ultimate divorce. With a novelist’s gift for character delineation, description and suspense, she has a scholar’s aptitude for accuracy and sourcing of facts. Part biography, part autobiography, part love story and part a forceful condemnation of war, this is a fascinating and captivating book.
Marlowe is an award-winning war correspondent herself who reports now from Paris for The Irish Times. She emerges in this book as an outstanding and courageous reporter, fearlessly telling the truth and arguing with Time magazine editors who often did not want to accept the truth.
Marlowe is most fervent in her praise for Fisk’s passionate honesty, which earned him the hatred of military leaders, politicians, war lords, dictators, intelligence agencies and arms dealers in the West and the Middle East. A legend among war correspondents of his generation, Fisk died of a stroke last year, leaving a powerful vacancy in the press corps of the Middle East and in Marlowe’s heart, although they were no longer married.
“His oeuvre,” she writes, “constitutes one of the most convincing denunciations of war and of weapons proliferation in existence. When we described the effects of Israeli, American and Nato attacks on civilians in our articles, we were often accused of ‘war porn’. The politicians who initiated wars and the weapons manufacturers who enabled them were the pornographers, not us, Robert argued. ‘If people saw what we see, they would never, ever support a war.’”
One of the best contemporary criticisms of war and of all those who pursue it
Marlowe describes Fisk as “an unrelenting crusader for wronged and oppressed peoples, who catalogued atrocities and injustice with frightening intensity. The job of a journalist was ‘to be neutral and unbiased on the side of those who suffer’, he said.”
And again, “Robert was fearless, and his fearlessness was contagious. ‘You are going there to report, not to die!’ he insisted whenever I expressed anxiety about heading for a war zone. ‘Don’t be so vain as to think that the bullet [or shell or bomb] should choose you among thousands of people!’”
Fisk had from his earliest days been a reporter who refused to be compromised by the great and the powerful, including during his 1970s coverage for the London Times of the Northern Ireland conflict when he did not hesitate to report critically on the paramilitaries or the British security forces. The first time I met Fisk was in 1975 during the “Carnation Revolution” in Portugal where I was posted as an Irish diplomat. He turned up at the Irish Embassy one morning, saying the British embassy had refused to help him. We toured most of the country over coming weeks and he wrote some of the finest journalism on Portugal’s transition from fascism/communism to democracy.
Love in Time of War is one of the best contemporary criticisms of war and of all those who pursue it, using various pretexts cynically clad in geo-political or peacekeeping language. Marlowe writes: “Robert’s war on war took three forms: description of the needless suffering it inflicted, ridicule of the political and military leaders who initiated conflicts, and going after the arms dealers.”
Last month, the journalist Matt Taibbi documented in the Intercept newsletter the insidious influence of the arms manufacturers and dealers on US foreign policy, especially the big five of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, which overall took in $167 billion (€144 billion) in 2020 in federal contracts. Since the start of the Afghan war, contractors donated $135 million to both Democrats and Republicans in six key committees – the Armed Services, Defense Appropriations and Foreign Affairs/Relations committees in both the House and Senate, creating an ongoing dependency and ensuring there would be little opposition to wars in Congress.
In the face of such dominant political and business forces, Fisk often despaired that, “I don’t believe anything I wrote ever made an iota of difference.” But his and Marlowe’s reporting, together with that of hundreds of other brave journalists, forced generations of readers and viewers to confront the truth that war murders and wounds more innocent men, women and children than it “saves” or “liberates”. Arguably, one of the least pointless wars since the second World War might be Nato’s tardy military intervention in 1995 to curtail the Serbian genocide against Bosnian Muslims, strongly influenced by war correspondents like Fisk and Marlowe, who reported on the Sarajevo siege and the Srebrenica murders.
Marlowe denounces other “humanitarian interventions” such as that in Libya: “the use of military force to prevent human rights abuses – which was advocated by Obama’s ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, and the French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner – was discredited by the disastrous western intervention in Libya”.
During these wars, Marlowe and Fisk enjoyed a romantic and loving life for many years as illustrated by love notes, playfulness and humour, including riffs on their beloved cat, Walter the Puss. The love story is joyous and engrossing, including the years of courtship across oceans and the sanctuary of their home in Dalkey as a respite from war.
Years later, their love falters for many reasons that Marlowe honestly discusses.
A gripping tale of savagery and courage, of history in the making, intertwined with rich personal reminiscences
Undoubtedly, Fisk’s intensity, depression and obsession with proving the cruelty and uselessness of war take a toll. Marlowe is unsparing in documenting her own surprising contribution to the break-up. Both of them lived under horrible pressure that would have threatened any relationship, regularly witnessing atrocities, always living under the threat of being kidnapped or killed. Her chapter on the suffering of the Beirut hostages, including their good friend and fellow journalist, Terry Anderson, brutally incarcerated for seven years, is vivid and chilling.
Compelling in its intensity and honesty, this book is a beautiful tribute to a great reporter as well as a riveting story, deservedly earning the praise of many, including Noam Chomsky who describes it as a “gripping tale of savagery and courage, of history in the making, intertwined with rich personal reminiscences”.
Stylishly written, Love in Time of War is replete with gems such as “It is hard to kill an Arab dictator,” or “These people [editors] think wars are like cricket matches,” and “In Basra, the great rusting hulks of Iraq’s merchant navy list at the quayside in the Shatt al-Arab River, next to luxuriant palm groves. It’s an image worthy of a García Márquez novel, magical realism in the Persian Gulf.”
Above all else, Marlowe succeeds in her stated goal that “this book will impart to those who did not have the privilege of knowing Robert a sense of the character of an extraordinary man and a truly great journalist”.
Ted Smyth is a former Irish diplomat and business executive who lives in New York city. He is chairman of the board of the Clinton Institute of American Studies at UCD and president of the board at Glucksman Ireland House, New York University
