Rachel Cusk: Isn't it odd the sun's out, darling

Philip Larkin said that there were two ways to approach the question of mortality: one was to make your days always different; the other was to make them always the same. I subscribe, however unwillingly, to the second regime, but I wonder whether people with what are usually referred to as "full lives" find it easier to digest bad news. George Bush certainly corroborates this suspicion. His face seems perpetually engorged with blood, like an animal caught feeding on its prey. But a friend in London reported hearing the charge of boredom levelled at the war in Iraq and its media coverage. Enough already, went the complaint. It may just have been the irritating phraseology, but it caused me to look more kindly on my Somerset neighbours, whose doggedly parochial conversation had been causing me almost to believe that the war was something I'd inexplicably made up.

Our Exmoor valley is peaceful, and the notion of war is unreal and disturbing, so that the silence itself begins to seem culpable. It is impossible to escape the fact that you are doing nothing to help, and, moreover, that in Iraq countless women are waiting for violence much as you wait for news of its consequence. I put my children to bed and wonder how my Baghdad counterparts survive their nights, spent beneath what one reporter chillingly described as "an assault on the senses". In our house, the radio emits its sombre ribbon of words. The television set is a box of death. These are not flowers, said an Iraqi man on the news. These are not flowers, they are bombs. My small daughters both looked at me – this was not the way news was usually expressed. They seemed to feel that they were being specifically addressed. My four-year-old has been preoccupied by a story her grandfather told her about the Blitz, when he was not much older than her. In the middle of one night he was taken to the air-raid shelter by his parents, and when they emerged they found that a bomb had fallen through the centre of his bed. I remember seeing the figure for civilian deaths in the Blitz and thinking it amazingly high. How sad that this traumatic event should have bequeathed us so little in the form of restraint.

Two weeks of sunshine have conferred their own brilliant unreality. Isn't it odd, my mother remarked, how the weather is always lovely when there's a war on. This was clearly a reference to the First World War, which occurred before she was born, but whose apparently glorious summers are frequently sentimentalised in television dramas. It struck me that the English remain wedded both to that period and that romantic version of war, in spite of the ugly, prosaic conflicts we have witnessed since. As for the weather, The Go-Between is the classic novel of high emotional and barometrical pressure; but recently I read Camus' La Peste and found relevance everywhere in it, not least in the descriptions of how in our misfortunes we become the victims of our environment. Late in the book there is a detailed description of the protracted death of a child. It is a terrible passage, in which the novel's refutation of God is accomplished. Yet one is made to feel by it not despair but a new understanding of the power of virtue. We must all die, Camus seems to say; and in view of that fact good and bad become what distinguish us.

Which leads me to the patriotic observation that, in spite of the repugnance of war, and in spite of the uncertain vision of liberation, British soldiers have so far conducted themselves noticeably better than their American counterparts. Admittedly, this isn't that hard: it comes down to not bombing your own side or shooting children in broad daylight. What is even more sickening is the sentiment heaped on these characters in the American media. It has been standard practice for politicians to weep at the funerals of servicemen, but now a vial of tears has apparently become mandatory among newsreaders, too, at the mere mention of injury to these fit, fully armed and trained professional killers. Their victims remain merely numbers.

Tears are shed here in Somerset also – over bedtime, biscuits, disputed toys. On the front page of the newspaper is a photograph of a baby of about the same age as mine; blackened with blood, its dummy fallen from its dead lips.

Rachel Cusk is one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists of 2003. Her latest novel is 'The Lucky Ones' (Fourth Estate)