‘Home, grief, deracination’ – here is the trio of themes running through journalist Tom Parfitt’s debut book High Caucasus. Just as Geoffrey Chaucer described a walking pilgrimage to Canterbury, this memoir-cum-travelogue charts Parfitt’s voyage by foot in search of healing for the vicarious trauma he experienced while reporting from scenes of sheer horror. It is a work steeped in empathy. Through it, Parfitt, who has worked as a foreign correspondent for The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, and The Times, provides a brilliant introduction for Westerners keen to understand the territory and the peoples of the North Caucasus, as well as the complex relationship that exists between the Caucasus and Russia.
Tom Parfitt’s story begins in Beslan. He is sent by his newspaper to report on the school siege that took place there in 2004. ‘Some gunmen have stormed a school in southern Russian…Chechens, I guess,’ an editor in London tells him. The setting is the Second Chechen War, which was launched in 1999 by the newly appointed Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin. It is the job of a professional journalist to report on violent incidents with the cool detachment and forensic analysis of a surgeon. And yet the act of witnessing atrocities takes its toll on even the most proficient of reporters. In Beslan, Parfitt witnesses’ scenes of devastating trauma. One moment in particular is to etch itself into his mind:
Her left hand grasps at the air.
She is groaning like a wounded animal.
She has just learned that her child was killed in the school.
The grief has entered her body fast and deep, and she is crumpling to the ground.
Back in Moscow, Parfitt continues to be haunted by the nightmare vision of this bereft mother. He finds himself unable to blot out the terrible scenes that were unfolding around him in Beslan. And so he resolves to embark on an epic walk across the Caucasus mountain range, all the way from Abkhazia and the shores of the Black Sea to Dagestan’s Caspian coast. In this way, he hopes to trudge the trauma out of his system, while also learning about the entire region.
Tom Parfitt, High Caucasus, Headline, London, 2023.
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