What the literature of recent wars has broken open — and what it still cannot say

The Asian Review Editorial

May 2026

The old lie, Wilfred Owen warned us, is Latin. Dulce et decorum est. It takes a dead language to ennoble a dead boy. But the lie of the last decade’s war literature is subtler, dressed not in rhetoric but in restraint — in the stripped sentence, the flat affect, the soldier narrator who has seen so much he has learned, finally, to see nothing. We have mistaken numbness for wisdom, and called it style.

Consider what the decade has given us. Phil Klay’s Redeployment — a debut story collection, a National Book Award winner, a book that seemed to contain a new grammar for the Iraq war — opens with a soldier shipping home and being handed his dog. The dog has been living in the kennel, waiting. Klay writes it flat, procedural, as if the reunion of man and animal after a year of killing were simply another military handoff. It is devastating. But notice what the flatness costs: the story can tell us how soldiers return; it cannot quite tell us what they were doing when they left. The Iraqi civilian is present in the distance — a figure at whom things are aimed, a problem to be managed — but rarely a subject in the way the veteran is a subject. The moral centre of even the best American war fiction remains, stubbornly, American.

The moral centre of even the best American war fiction remains, stubbornly, American.

Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds is even more beautiful and even more enclosed. Powers — himself a veteran of the Mosul campaign — writes in sentences that bend toward elegy before the elegy is earned, lush lines that turn combat into lyric landscape. The war in The Yellow Birds is less a political event than a weather system, ancient and indifferent. This, too, is a kind of lie. Wars have architects. They have beneficiaries. But the elegiac mode, which has claimed so much of the decade’s war writing, is structurally incapable of accountability. You cannot prosecute a fog.

Harry Parker’s Anatomy of a Soldier attempts something formally braver: the novel is narrated by objects — a tourniquet, a boot, a detonator — and in doing so triangulates between the British soldier who nearly dies and the Afghan boy who nearly kills him. Parker, who lost both legs to an IED, earns his formal experiment with his body. The objects know no allegiance; they cross the conflict’s moral divide the way shrapnel crosses flesh. It is the decade’s most interesting structural answer to the problem of war fiction’s centring — and yet even here, the Afghan interiority is rendered with more care for its strangeness than for its particularity. We understand the boy as figure; we do not quite know him as person.

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Sinan Antoon’s The Baghdad Eucharist, translated from Arabic, offers what the American and British canon almost structurally cannot: the occupied city as protagonist, its Christian minority as witness to the slow erasure of a civilisation. Antoon, who left Baghdad himself, writes without the foreigner’s instinct to explain. His characters are not metonyms for Iraq; they are people who happen to live where the bombs fall. This distinction — between fiction that uses a country and fiction that inhabits it — is the decade’s most instructive literary divide. It is also, largely, a marketing divide. The Baghdad of American war fiction has sold enormously. Antoon’s Baghdad, which tells us far more, has required translation to reach us.

David Abrams’s Fobbit goes the other direction entirely, into dark comedy and military bureaucracy, satirising the Forward Operating Base as a kind of Kafkaesque middle management of violence, where press releases are drafted while bodies are processed. It is necessary, funny, and — like all satire — slightly less true than what it attacks. The best satire of institutions requires the institution to still exist. What does it mean to satirise a war that continues? Fobbit was published in 2012; the war it lampoons has not, technically, ended.

What the decade’s non-fiction has sometimes managed better than its fiction is the acknowledgment of this unendingness. Dexter Filkins’s The Forever War — that title which has entered common usage — understood early that the story was structural, not episodic, that what the journalist’s notebook was recording was not a conflict with a resolution but a condition, a permanent emergency being administered by the world’s largest military. The word ‘forever’ in that title is the decade’s most honest editorial judgment.

The elegiac mode, which has claimed so much of the decade’s war writing, is structurally incapable of accountability. You cannot prosecute a fog.

And now, at the decade’s turning, Ukraine. The literature of the Russia-Ukraine war is still assembling itself — partly because writers are still inside it, partly because the war’s scale and modernity (drones, Telegram, the iPhone photograph as first draft of history) have created documentation faster than art can metabolise it. But already something significant is happening: writers like Artem Chapeye are producing work that refuses the separation between literary form and political witness, memoir that does not apologise for its anger, essays that wear their partisanship as a condition of their honesty. The elegiac mode is, for now, unavailable. There is no distance from which to aestheticise what is ongoing.

Perhaps this is what the last ten years of war literature ultimately teaches. Distance — temporal, geographical, formal — is not neutral. It is a choice that encodes a politics. The beautiful sentence that turns the dead soldier into a lyric image is an act of power over that soldier no less than the order that sent him. The literature that stays inside the wound — ugly, unresolved, formally unbeautiful — may be telling us something that elegy, for all its grace, has decided not to say. The question for the next decade’s war writing is whether it can hold beauty and accountability in the same sentence. Whether the word, after the bullet, can be more than consolation.

Ataul Osmani