The ultimate war story

By 1991, Mogadishu under the warlords had become so chaotic and dangerous that one of Hartley's fellow reporters, a grizzled veteran, remarked: 'I wouldn't even send my first wife there.'

Hartley sent himself-and happily took daft risks. On one not particularly dramatic but instructive occasion, he heard gunfire coming from an alley. While any halfway normal person would have sprinted away at record pace, or at least taken some sort of cover, Hartley's first instinct was to yell: 'Let's go down there.'

The photographer refused and just as well, because a second or two later the alley was filled by the boom of an exploding grenade.

When the U.S. and the UN intervene in Somalia, trying to bring some order to the chaos, they only make matters worse - par for the course, Hartley judges, in the long, ignoble history of Western intervention or meddling in Africa.

Local hostility to the U.S. and the UN's blue-helmeted peacekeepers erupted into appalling violence after an incident that was almost ignored in the West when American helicopter gunships took out a villa supposedly full of gangsters and warlords, but actually full of innocent men, women and children.

In the riots that followed, the Somalis attacked U.S. Black Hawk helicopters and killed 18 American soldiers.

Mobs also killed the first Westerners they saw - reporters and a photographer who were Hartley's colleagues and good friends.

After the American troops withdrew, abandoning Somalia to its lawless fate, Hartley tried to recuperate with a beach holiday. Instead, he found himself listening compulsively to the BBC World Service and itching for action. So when he heard of trouble in Rwanda, he was off again, this time to witness the emerging genocidal massacre of Tutsis by Hutus.

The killing frenzy and biblical devastation in Rwanda provided Hartley with even more nightmarish scenes to be tormented and haunted by. By then, he seemed to be at breaking-point - 'poisoned', he says, by all the trauma and evil he had seen and stricken by guilt that he 'only reported instead of offering active help'.

So it comes as a real relief when he finally leaves Reuters and takes time out to write this book and thereby perhaps make some sort of sense of it all.

But this result is much more than a harrowing exercise in therapy. 'The best white writing from Africa in many, many years' is how the South African author Rian Malan describes The Zanzibar Chest, and that seems just about right.

I have a few quibbles about some overwritten passages and Hartley's penchant for long lists of impressive or appalling exotica, plus the effectively redundant storyline about Peter Davey.

But these are only quibbles because this is a truly impressive and haunting book, an impassioned and often beautifully written account of one man's journey to the heart of darkness, and his slow, painful voyage back.