Combat Camera, by A.J. Somerset, Biblioasis, 255 pages, $19.95
A career in war photography has taken its toll on Lucas Zane, the complex, dark character at the heart of Combat Camera, A.J. Somerset’s gritty debut novel and the winner of the Metcalf-Rooke Award.
Zane was once a young, idealistic war photographer. He won a Pulitzer Prize in his early 20s for his work in El Salvador and spent the next 22 years flying from one war zone to the next.
Somewhere along the line, though, he lost the ability to stomach his role as a detached observer of tragedy. He stopped believing in the moral purpose of photography, that the power of an image can spread compassion: Even the greatest photograph, he started to think, is nothing more than an “eloquent lie.”
Combat Camera opens with Zane on the ropes: 46 years old, drunk, friendless and possessing “no detectable ambition at all.” To pay the bills, he works as a photographer at Diamond Blue Productions, a small Internet pornography company on the outskirts of Toronto. Zane is perfect for the job: As in war, he can detach himself from the subject and let the camera do the work. When one young woman gets her face punched in by her brutish co-star, Bill, for an unsatisfactory performance, Zane feels nothing. He simply continues taking photos, mentally congratulating himself “on his excellent shutter timing.”
Somerset – a one-time soldier and a freelance photographer – paints a convincing picture of Zane’s messed-up head: The reader follows as his mechanical eye scans a bleak, desolate Toronto, paying more attention to the lighting on people’s faces, their potential to become still images, than anything else. All that can puncture this barrier – his iron lens, as it were – are Zane’s horrifying war flashbacks.
Yet he maintains a consistent sense of humour – self-deprecating, gruff, curmudgeonly. Somerset’s prose illuminates this. In one scene, Zane looks at his cellphone with “loathing, as one might regard a coiled and dangerous snake.”
Then along comes Melissa, a screwed-up 21-year-old stripper and amateur porn star, with an “endless talent for innuendo.” She weasels her way into Zane’s life, and when Bill attacks her in the middle of a shoot, this time Zane reacts. He cracks Bill over the head with his camera and takes off with Melissa to Vancouver in the middle of the night. “We’ll just drive till we stop,” Zane says, which brings to mind another literary getaway: Frederic Henry rowing Catherine Barkley through the night from war-ridden Italy to neutral Switzerland, in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. These are both hard, decisive journeys; both attempts by damaged men to escape a falling-apart world.
And there’s another Hemingway similarity in Combat Camera: A war injury has left Zane, like Jake Barnes from The Sun Also Rises, impotent. Zane’s impotence is just another symptom that has left him, in his middle-age, grappling to feel anything. Lacking the courage to slash his wrists with a kitchen knife, one rum-soaked evening he aims his camera toward his face and imagines the obituary: “An image on his camera’s flash card confirmed that Mr. Zane had committed suicide by shooting himself once in the head with a wide-angle lens.”
Although a ridiculous notion, Zane’s fantasy stems from a question that courses through the body of this violent, funny, thought-provoking novel: Do photographs dehumanize us?
Jules Lewis is a writer from Toronto. His first novel, Waiting for Ricky Tantrum, was published in October.
