War’s horrendous toll evidences itself early on in life for Vic Woods and his wife, Ruth, the two principal characters of C.J. Barker’s “Hungry Ghosts,” with Vic’s mother presumed dead in a Luftwaffe bombing of Liverpool and Ruth’s sailor brother Jim turning up missing in action. But the war's toll on the two will make itself felt even more up close and personal with the devastation that Vic sees as a bombardier over Dresden, with the images from it and thoughts of what it must have been like for people on the ground so devastating that they will haunt him for the rest of his life and factor into his constant abuse of Ruth.
A way he’ll find to cope, though, will be through photography, with his career taking off after the war with an image he captures of a veteran throwing himself off London Bridge and then later, during Vietnam, with a photo of a nun immolating herself in protest of the war.
So celebrated will his pictures become that they’ll be the stuff of an autobiographical book, “World On Fire,” though his son will be less than enthusiastic about the acclaim, wondering in particular why Vic didn’t put down the camera to help the nun.
A legitimate question about journalism in general, whether an observer should intervene in particularly horrendous situations, and one of particular interest to me as a retired journalist, even if in the case of the nun, as in certain other horrific occasions (the famous picture of the Vietnamese general shooting a Viet Cong prisoner, for instance), the possibility or desirability of intervention is debatable (would you really have wanted to save the nun a minute or two after she went up in flames?). Still, Barker's novel is a worthy consideration of the issue, along with the auxiliary question of what draws some people to war journalism – or in the parlance of the book, what makes Vic a “hungry ghost,” always “chasing after something, anything to fill the void.”