The Devil is a Black Dog, by Sandor Jaszberenyi - book review: A warts-and-all portrait of reporting in remote war zones

These extraordinary stories are searingly truthful, and could only have been written by someone who has succeeded in his wish “to see the face of evil”

How was Africa? the author is asked during a trip home to his native Hungary. “The weather was nice” is the only answer he can come up with. The futility of describing the agonies and horror to be found in the remote war zones and troublespots of Africa and the Middle East occurs more than once in this stark and often disturbing work. The job of a war reporter, he says at one point, is “to convey the private hell of others, as though you understand it, or as though it has anything to do with you”.

Yet that is exactly what Sandor Jaszberenyi succeeds in doing in his collection of stories. He – or his fictional alter-ego – is the type of hardboiled, self-embedded reporter who goes against the flow, telling the stories of characters that mainstream journalists – parachute journalists, as he calls them-– rarely encounter.

Some read a bit like Somerset Maugham tales, with a twist: the Muslim surgeon who loses his faith, the Foreign Legionnaire who visits a “ghost-rider”, a type of medium possessed by prophetic spirits. Others focus on particular experiences of the storyteller himself, from boyhood to maturity.

Death and indifference to suffering are common themes. NGO workers discuss sex and circumcised penises while registering corpses in a mass grave. An evacuated humanitarian worker fusses over her creature comforts, having abandoned Sudanese refugees to their fate at the hands of marauding rebels. Nor is the callousness confined to war zones. In one story, the amphetamine and coke-fuelled narrator's main concern following the death of his father is disposing of the family dog, by whatever means necessary.

That story, and others, show the narrator in a brutally honest and unflattering light. How does he keep calm in distressing situations, he's asked by a cub reporter. “I drink, I work out, I don't give a shit,” is his response. The publishers state that the collection is a blend of fact and fiction. The stories are variously told in the first, second and third persons.

In one, the narrator's editor challenges, apparently correctly, the authenticity of a story he has submitted. So how far does this book paint a warts-and-all portrait of Jaszberenyi himself? Or is he concealing himself by deliberately constructing one or more unreliable narrators?

This may nag at the back of your mind as you read, but strangely it doesn't detract from the feeling that these extraordinary stories are searingly truthful, and could only have been written by someone who has succeeded in his wish “to see the face of evil” – in the world, in others, and even, possibly, in himself.

Scribe, £9.99