The whispering ghosts, John Connolly's new book looks at PTSD

The whispering ghosts
Profile: John Connolly
Jul 25, 2010 12:00 AM
By Michelle Magwood


Michelle Magwood talks of war, love and archetypes with an author whose books make your flesh crawl

John Connolly prefaces his latest novel with an arresting quotation regarding the nature of war: "War is a mythical happening ... where else in human experience, except in the throes of ardor ... do we find ourselves transported to a mythical condition and the gods most real?"

The quote, from psychologist James Hillman's A Terrible Love of War, cues the reader in to the central theme of The Whisperers. The setting is his familiar Maine, but the story snakes far across the world to the war in Iraq.

After a bloody battle between US soldiers and the Feyadeen in Baghdad, a museum of rare antiquities is plundered. Among the treasures that disappear is a seemingly ordinary sealed box. Seemingly, that is, but this is a John Connolly novel. And Connolly can make the flesh crawl off your hands.

The box surfaces in the woods of Maine, where the stolen artefacts are awaiting transport. There's a booming smuggling operation shuttling over the border between Maine and Canada: weapons, cash and drugs, secreted in the monster trucks that ply the route. But lately other more rare and valuable goods are being shifted too.

Enter Charlie Parker, a private detective who is asked to investigate the suicide of a young soldier recently returned from Iraq. He's the third in his platoon to kill himself, and it emerges that he has been involved in the smuggling operation. What is driving them to their deaths? Is it the ancient ghosts raked up by their spoils, or the ghosts of their fellow soldiers cut down beside them in Iraq?

"Post traumatic stress disorder is a problem for the US military," says Connolly. "They've made them more efficient soldiers, but they're making it harder for them to go back to normality." The US Veterans Administration is reporting disturbing numbers of suicides and suicide attempts by returning combatants.

"More US soldiers are killing themselves than dying in the field. More British soldiers died by their own hand after the Falklands War than were killed over there."
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The whispering ghosts