Some of Mr. Fair’s descriptions of Abu Ghraib and the National Security Agency facilities at Camp Victory recall the absurdities of Catch-22 and Animal Farm, but here the sense of the absurd is infused with real horror and injustice ... [a] profoundly unsettling book.
Fair has a compelling, matter-of-fact voice. He never shirks responsibility or offers excuses while recounting his struggles with alcohol, marital strains and mental health ... This lean, well-edited memoir gratefully leaves out politicized commentary. Fair gives us simply a record of what happened.
In Consequence, a disturbing twist on a coming-of-age story, Fair learns about his own life and about his country — and also about the desire to hurt and humiliate other people ... This sparsely written and moving book is about silence. Fair expresses regret for the times when he didn’t speak out, allowing detainees to be abused.
...an important reckoning with more than a decade of continuous war. It is a memoir written in a spare, cadenced voice. It describes the author’s self-aware, agonizing moral and psychological descent as he accepts an assignment as an interrogator in Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi detention facilities after 2003. The author’s idealism, pain, and, eventually, expressive political dissent recall Siegfried Sassoon, the British poet and decorated military officer during World War I whose objections to that conflict led the authorities to hospitalize him for what was then called 'shell shock' ... Fair’s memoir never strays far from moral introspection, but his account of his travel is funny and sharp. It draws the reader into dark corners of the Iraqi battlefield—chaotic prisons, overheated interrogation booths, tactical intelligence cells in bunkers—where few other war memoirs enter.
The greatest strength of Consequence threatens to become a weakness. The lean, unadorned style that worked well for recounting war zone horrors feels too neutral and detached when Fair returns home to describe how war changed him and the effect it had on his health and marriage. It’s legitimate to wonder if Fair wrote the third act too soon, but this small concern doesn’t detract from an otherwise impressive debut.
Mr. Fair’s writing style is workshop writing and sometimes it can get in the way of the narrative. Here though, the constant present tense, piling up of details and terse delivery help cut through the complexity of his experiences. The dark humor helps too.
Fair saw no fighting in his war, yet his book has the stifled anger and hollow feeling of remembered combat ... Consequence is Fair’s attempt to confront what he did, and failed to do. It reads like a compulsion, a bare-bones Dragnet narrative, if Detective Joe Friday were trying to find out why a man who once took refuge in church finds himself playing a Roman.
Fair, who followed brutal orders as an Abu Ghraib interrogator, has no choice but to relive those sessions, mainly in his nightmares. His decision to assemble them into a memoir isn’t necessarily heroic, but his self-lacerating moral clarity might be. Fear’s journey from Pennsylvania to the army, the police, government-contract work, a Christian seminary, and a heart transplant — all narrated in staccato present tense — fills out the picture of a good soldier doing bad work in a terrible war.
