The book is as much a romantic tragedy about Marlowe and Fisk’s relationship as it is a gripping account of the Middle East’s myriad conflicts and those caught in the crossfires. Packed with sex, war and near-death encounters, Marlowe’s memoir feels primed for a screen adaptation.
Readers unfamiliar with the journalist’s war reporting in the Middle East and the Balkans will see a new side to the Irish Times correspondent, well-known and respected for her reporting from Paris and Washington DC.
Marlowe recounts the early and complicated romance she had with Fisk after meeting him in Damascus in 1983. Before setting off on a brief stint as a US diplomat, Marlowe ends up marrying a Canadian film producer – the “wrong Robert”.
After three years of marriage interspersed with international trysts with Fisk, Marlowe leaves the “wrong Robert” for the right one. Fisk relocates from his beloved Beirut to Paris but, as with any good thriller, it is only a matter of time before they will both be lured back to Beirut.
Their life in the Lebanese capital is “an erratic routine of semi-normal life and bombardments”, as the couple cover the end of a civil war that will ultimately leave 200,000 dead.
Marlowe’s descriptions of the conflict-ridden Lebanon in the late 1980s – electricity shortages, inflation, and vacant political posts – could sadly describe the struggling country today.
As a fledgling journalist 12 years Fisk’s junior, Marlowe jokingly refers to herself as an “earnest pupil of the Fisk School of Journalism”. She recognised the considerable advantages of having Fisk as her tutor but feared that she would never reach his level. The self-doubt provides a human contrast to Fisk’s famed certitude and seeming invincibility.
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The demands of living with Fisk echo Michelle Obama’s sentiment in her memoir Becoming about her husband, Barack Obama: “All this inborn confidence was admirable, of course, but honestly, try living with it.”
Marlowe comes into her own while covering the Algerian civil war, a decade-long conflict between the government and Islamist rebel groups that left 150,000 dead. She chillingly reports on waterboarding, beheadings, and murky state-sanctioned killings.
Her account of Islamist militants entering a school during the Algerian civil war and publicly executing a girl has a particularly disturbing contemporary relevance, as schoolgirls in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan once again find themselves targeted by violent extremism and misogyny.
Time magazine, Marlowe’s previous employer in Beirut, is subject to some frank criticism in these pages: the editorial team routinely compromised the integrity of her copy, and she wonders if “Time is just an elaborate cover for US intelligence, the equivalent of Pravda and TASS in the Soviet Union”.
The memoir ends with the slow and painful disintegration of Marlowe’s marriage to Fisk, as each struggles to reckon with the other’s infidelity against the backdrop of the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Marlowe is candid about her personal struggle with reconciling the “sense of betrayal that comes with the break-down of a marriage” and her gratitude and love for Fisk.
Love in a Time of War feels like a cathartic exercise, one that perhaps could not have been accomplished while Fisk was alive.
Before describing their last, chance meeting before his death, Marlowe says with the clarity that time and reflection bring: “I am proud to have been his wife and I miss his presence in the world.”