What Will Survive

Joan Smith’s 2007 novel “What Will Survive”, is like “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada”, a story about the search for truth behind the circumstances of a killing, and deals with challenging contemporary political themes. Also like the Tommy Lee Jones film, the novel has a chronology which switiches between past and present, and occasionally catches you out. ”What Will Survive” would make a good film of television drama too, and I hope it makes the screen some time.

Smith’s story is ostensibly about the death of former model, and now international development activist, Aisha Lincoln in the Lebanon, when she is critically injured in a land mine explosion. A young freelance “celebrity” journalist called Amanda has been covering Aisha’s life, and, afet her death, travels to the Lebanon to find out more about how she died.

Amanda’s epiphany occurs shortly after she arrives in Beirut. Her escort in the city, a Swedish freelance called Ingrid, takes Amanda to a local market : “When they reached the last stall, she saw that the dilapidated buildings extended for miles, marking the beginning of what looked like a vast slum”. This “vast slum” turns out to have developed from a refugee camp, about which Ingrid is making a film.

As Aisha’s story starts to unfold for Amanda, so does that of the Lebanon between the early 1980s and 1996-7. This is the year in which the novel’s main action is set and it also deals deftly with the British political scene in the anticipated, and then actual, demise of a long-running Conservative government, the coming into power of New Labour, and the subsequent tragic death of Princess Diana.

This convergence of events ultimately makes it difficult for Amanda to obtain the media coverage both for Aisha’s story and that of the Lebanon, which she now knows they deserve. “What Will Survive” – which itself cleverly usages “reportage” to unfold events – is not only a very good story well-told, but also a commentary on British and international media values of the recent past.