How Kevin Patterson brought Afghanistan's brutal chaos to life

When Kevin Patterson arrived in Kandahar as a doctor in the winter of 2007, he didn't pick up a pen and start writing about it. (The waves of mass casualties, the gunshots and blast wounds kept him pretty busy.) But, years after he returned from his three-month stint, images started to percolate. Like many great novels about war, News from the Red Desert took time — and the difference between war in its immediacy and in its abstractions became one of the book's central themes. In his own words, Kevin Patterson talks about how he wrote this powerful novel about the war in Afghanistan.

Photographic memory

"News from the Red Desert started the way all my other fiction has: with an image. And that image for me, in this case, was the very first one in the novel, at the Taliban's Last Stand, which is the name of a building on the Kandahar airfield base. [The book opens in December 2001, with the American forces wondering whether they've just won the war.] I imagined what that moment was like. The soldiers there had the idea that something had just ended or just started — was it all wrapped up now? What was their feeling in that moment? Any kind of sense of mission accomplished would have rung pretty ironic in retrospect. The book really started with the first scene - that's not always the way it goes, but it's the way it went this time.

"These images started to coalesce and develop within me long after I was there myself. At the time, though, I was really struck by all the vestiges of that earlier struggle — years afterwards, you can still see the shattered buildings and bullet holes in the windows. I was struck by the way that that chaos endured, and how it kept hanging around and replicating itself, which is sort of the idea that animated the book generally."

Percolating characters

"When I was stationed in Kandahar, I was interested in the baristas who worked at the coffee shop near the hospital. I remember sitting there and watching them and watching the society they kept, and how they lived in this bubble surrounded by westerners drinking their cappuccinos and eating their pastries. The interaction was odd - this was a time that Bush was championing his war on terror while there's this clot of local men in this coffee shop serving everyone. I wondered what they thought, what they thought of everyone around them and of this whole enterprise they had become a part of.

"I also remember watching the journalists walking around the base, who were almost vibrating with excitement at the intensity of everything, and I remember being struck by that. One by one, these characters occurred to me. As the writer, my job was to weave them together, to entwine them. I watched the characters talk to one another and interact and basically transcribed the interaction." 

Café confinement

"When I'm writing, I don't take time off from work. I talk to writers who are able to take months away by themselves and get up and write all day, and I'm not sure I would prosper with that kind of limitless time. I think it would paralyze me. When I'm doing a string of nights in the ICU and they haven't been that busy, I'll go out during the day to a café and write quite a bit. There's something about having something else happening that makes it possible to concentrate when there's this counterweight to my day.

"I wrote a lot of this book at The Vault Café in Nanaimo — so much so that I actually mention it in the acknowledgements. I would eat a BLT and drink coffee, and when the writing was going well, I would have that cinematic thing where I'd sit and watch the characters interacting with each other. In a café, feeling a little self-conscious with other strangers around, there's a useful sense of confinement there. It's like the other customers are holding me accountable, if only in my imagination. In reality, they don't care a bit. I'm just one more guy with a laptop."

Kevin Patterson's comments have been edited and condensed.