Book Review: Land of the Blind

Reviewed by Peggy Kurkowski

A searing fictionalized memoir about exacting personal vengeance after a roadside bomb kills a friend in Afghanistan

 “War zones are places of human extremes,” and for Andy Owens’s unnamed narrator in the moving novel Land of the Blind, they also forever change those who make it out.

Afghanistan 2007. Owens’s protagonist, a Royal Marine captain, and his small team attached to the Afghan National Security Directive, make a visit to an Afghan National Army checkpoint along the road linking Kandahar with the capital of Helmand Province. What happens to his close friend and fellow soldier, Jim, forms the nucleus of Owens’s story about grief, revenge, and remorse. 

A story brilliantly structured around fragments of his protagonist’s experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan in the mid-2000s, Land of the Blind is so persuasive in its authenticity that one forgets it is fiction. In some ways, Owen’s collection of memory fragments—from his joining the military in 2004, his military intelligence experiences in Iraq, and his Woolfian “moments of being” in battle—is reminiscent of another stellar “fictional” collection of war stories, All the Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. 

The death that changes everything informs the beginning as the Marine captain packs up Jim’s bunk and personal belongings, struck by the unfinished book on his bed. But the narrative soon begins to flow back and forth in time, with Owens’s narrator reflecting on his friendship with Jim, who is like a Zen philosopher-king: “Jim thought we were all groping in the dark … He would often pronounce, when he correctly forecasted a negative outcome to a coalition operation, ‘In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.’” 

Grappling with grief and rage, the narrator is slow to share the actual description of Jim’s death (coming over halfway through the book), but once he does, the story takes on the more fictional story, as he and his two closest teammates, Gary and Chris, employ the help of their Afghan intelligence counterpart, Khalid, to find the person responsible for planting the bomb that killed Jim. Armed with that intelligence, they act on their anger and pain—but to what end? 

“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live, due to the experiences we have and what we decide to do.”

The question “did I do the right thing?” reverberates throughout Land of the Blind, which also serves as a collective query for America and the UK and their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Owens’s attitude to the “never-ending” wars of the early 2000s is clearly stated in the voice of his disillusioned protagonist: “We had failed not only to effect the changes we thought we were making in Afghanistan but also to see how it was changing us.” But still, the absurd and profound are intricately bound up in the narrator’s memories, some of which are quite funny (Operation Chicken Dinner, for one).

In little under two hundred pages, Owens delivers a powerful meditation on friendship, life, and sacrifice not soon forgotten. An important postscript about the 2021 withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and the narrator’s efforts to secure the escape of Afghan allies provides a bittersweet coda. As the narrator reflects on Afghanistan, his teammates, their actions, and what the war was about, it all comes back to a matter of vision. “If anyone was blind to what was going on it was us,” he says.

Haunting, evocative, and beautifully written, Land of the Blind is a compelling and timely exploration of the tangible and intangible casualties of war. I highly recommend this book. 

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