We Are Now Beginning Our Descent

James Meek’s masterful historical novel, The People’s Act of Love received accolades around the world, earning Meek comparisons to Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Conrad, and Greene. We Are Now Beginning Our Descent is a tour de force of storytelling, furthering his reputation as one of the most exciting and original young novelists writing today.Adam Kellas, a British journalist, would-be thriller novelist, and failed lover meets Astrid Walsh, a self-possessed, hard-charging reporter while the two are covering allied military operations in the Afghan mountains. After sharing one passionate night in a watchtower near a defunct airfield, Astrid disappears from Kellas’s life.A year later, following a disastrous dinner party in London during which he destroys his few remaining friendships, Kellas receives a short, beseeching e-mail and hastily embarks on a trans-Atlantic journey to a small town near the Chesapeake Bay where he believes Astrid waits for him. Kellas envisions the fresh start that his new life with Astrid might offer, unaware that she may be harboring unsettling secrets of her own.A passionate, incisive novel, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent lays bare the entwined hypocrisies, foibles, and desires of our age, and is a testament to the obsessive pull of love.From Publishers WeeklyThe author of The People's Act of Love returns with the midlife deconstruction of a reluctant war correspondent working in post-9/11 Afghanistan. What Scots journalist Adam Kellas truly wants is to be a bestselling novelist, but he watches aghast on 9/11 as the planned climax of his latest thriller-in-the-works becomes reality in lower Manhattan. Disappointed, he puts down his manuscript, takes an assignment in Afghanistan covering the subsequent war and falls for an American journalist, Astrid, who leads him into a dangerous blurring of the lines between observer and participant. On his return to the U.K., these conflicts boil over when Kellas attends a dinner party with his poet school chum Patrick M'Gurgan. The fallout—combined with a large advance offered on his next thriller (an imagined war between America and Europe)—leads Kellas on a wild journey to see Astrid, who's living near Chesapeake Bay. Meek's novel exhibits some irritating tendencies—a muddled narrative line, a romance with a few cloying moments and overindulgent digressions into philosophy—but Kellas's unraveling is deliciously enjoyable, and Meek's crafting of character and setting is often masterful. The result is a book that demands much patience from the reader, but delivers rewards in return. (May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Bookmarks MagazineWhile a few critics thought We Are Now Beginning Our Descent a worthy successor to The People’s Act of Love, most of them felt that Meek’s second novel lacked focus. Certainly, his topics are interestingâ€"love during wartime, the guilty complicity of journalists and their subjects, the West’s power playsâ€"but, along with digressive subplots (and a few stock characters), they never coalesce into a compelling whole. Meeks does, however, exhibit flashes of beautiful writing, and his nuanced exploration of the blurring between collaborator and victim is fascinating. Yet most reviewers would agree with the St. Petersburg Times: “If only [Meeks] had worked on the plot and tightened the edges, this book would have been a meaningful addition to the glorious fiction of war journalism.”Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.