Globe and Mail Reviews Combat Camera

Calling it a "violent, funny, thought-provoking novel," and comparing it with the work of Ernest Hemingway, Jules Lewis reviews A.J. Somerset's Combat Camera in today's Globe & Mail.

From the review:

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.”

For the whole review, please go here.