In an interview on Iraq

In John Lee Anderson’s book, The Fall of Baghdad, he interviews members of Saddam’s Ba’ath Party which must provide a different perspective from the other books?

Yes. He interviewed various Iraqis and shows the ambivalent relationship people had with the regime. He also includes some thorough and dextrous research. For example, he went to Iran and asked Iraqis there what they thought of Saddam and the US-led war and so on.

I would just say that if you want a book about the fall of Baghdad it’s a highly readable account, which I personally prize as being the most important thing in journalistic books. In my book I tried to be funny, which is always a risk. You have to be careful not to make cheap jokes about a very serious situation and it’s a fine line to tread between good and bad taste. I’ll leave it up to other people to decide whether I managed to do that or not.

To be honest, one of the reasons why I wrote the book the way I did was because when I came home people seemed genuinely curious to know what the basic things were like – the food, the people, the houses. It was different than if I’d been on a working trip to, say, Russia. I found that in answering those questions and telling my pub tales, as it were, the best material I had was the funny stuff. So I did not think I had the heart-rending anecdotes or, frankly, the literary ability to write a serious book.

But it’s a dark humour and it’s very effective. For example, when your translator tells you he has an ID card stating he is from a religious tribe and that it clearly commands the respect of other Iraqis, you ask him whether it’s better than having a gun. And he tells you very frankly that nothing is better than having a gun. Your book provides a lot of insight into some of the prevailing attitudes.

When I was kidnapped, I spent a lot of time laughing at how ludicrous the situation was to try to keep my spirits up, and I think people do the same thing during a war. But I should qualify that by saying that, at the end of the day, I was one of the lucky ones because nothing terribly traumatic happened to me. For a great number of people, mainly ordinary Iraqis, the whole thing offered very little to laugh at. It was just pure trauma. But as this was not the sort of thing that happened to me, and because I felt there were enough accounts that offered that perspective, I wrote a different type of book.

Books on serious subjects written with a sense of humour are more likely to be read by those who would not otherwise do so. And you can drip-feed information about the serious points. That can be a good alternative, and it goes against the presumption that a book about war reportage has to be, by definition, terribly serious.