Andrew O’Hagan writes:

Crossfire features a television reporter who is kidnapped in Kabul and may be beheaded online. Ryan’s new book, Strike Back, features a television reporter who is kidnapped in Beirut and may be beheaded online. The world of difference initially suggested by Ryan’s hapless victim being female is dispelled when you consider his book’s rugged hero, a McNabian squarehead called John Porter, former SAS man and now broken-backed vodka-guzzler under the arches of Vauxhall. All these men have a chance to thwart the toffs by fixing – via immense personal courage and a lot of guns and knives – the unfixable, getting in and out of foreign situations with an orange-flamed dexterity that would leave the characters in most video games gasping for extra battery power. And yet, along the way, these dreadful fictions are triumphant in catching the logic and the rhetoric of modern conflict. It’s as if one had discovered in 1942 that Bambi told you everything you needed to know about the reality of the Nazi threat. (What, are you denying it?)

(LRB 24 January 2008)

Century | hardback 314 pp. |ISBN: 9781844135356