THE CANAL HOUSE

Lee is an experienced foreign correspondent (who is currently also a vice-president at PEN Center USA), and his knowledge of the perils and challenges of that life comes across most powerfully in this somber and elegiac debut novel. It is the story of the life and death of war correspondent Daniel McFarland, who after a brush with death in Uganda develops a new sense of mission and responsibility toward those whose wracked lives he is covering. He is drawn into an affair with Julia Cadell, an English doctor who idealistically ministers to the suffering in war zones, and the book's title refers to a brief idyll they share in London before setting out again on dangerous missions. Their new one is in East Timor, where the Indonesian government is crushing an independence movement, while British and Australian troops, sent in by the UN, try to act as intermediaries without actually joining the fighting. The scenes on that idyllic island smashed by war are the best in the book—they have the breathless immediacy of battlefront reporting—and if Daniel's final decision is a bit melodramatic, a sad resolution is the only possible one for Lee's tale. A subplot about a wealthy British magnate in pursuit of Julia never quite convinces, and the narrator, a photographer who follows Daniel around, is a bit shadowy. But there's no denying the eloquence and terror of Lee's vistas of contemporary war in the world's more obscure corners. (May 9)

FYI:The current publicity around the movie version of Greene's The Quiet American could help refocus readers' attention on the role of the war correspondent, though the book's title and cover don't begin to convey its subject and quality.