This is but one of many points of entry Lindqvist presents in this cleverly constructed, innovative history. Structuring the book in a way that re-enacts the disruptions of history caused by the advent of the bomb, Lindqvist offers his readers a series of ways into and paths through this re-examination of a century of war.

In the manner of his acclaimed Exterminate All the Brutes and Desert Divers, Lindqvist here turns his distinctively fresh, inquisitive eye and tireless moral sense on the fascinating histories behind the development of air power, bombs and the laws of war and international justice, demonstrating how the practices of two world wars were born of colonial warfare.

Sven Lindqvist is one of Sweden's most interesting and innovative writers, fast building a cult following for his unorthodox and fiercely moral works of cultural history. Lindqvist's previous books, Desert Divers and Exterminate All the Brutes exposed the depths of European imperialism and racism in Africa. In his new book, A History of Bombing, he scrutinizes the history of

aerial bombing. From the dropping of the first ever bomb from an aeroplane—by the Italians on an oasis near Tripoli in 1911—through Guernica, Coventry, Dresden and Hiroshima, A History of Bombing examines the many ways in which aerial bombing has shaped our time. Granta deputy editor Sophie Harrison caught up with the author in London.

((Above before radar in 1930)

Granta:Your new book, A History of Bombing, is structured as a labyrinth, a series of narrative threads that require the reader to go backwards as well as forwards. Why did you choose to write it in this way? Sven Lindqvist: It has to do with my conception of history. For me history is not like a ten-lane motorway, where you can see from the start where you will finally arrive. It's much more like a maze or a labyrinth, where you struggle forward, taking one step in one direction and another step in another direction.

I was also inspired by the manuals of the role-playing games. Some young friends of mine play these games, and I noticed that the manuals were constructed as a series of short numbered pieces. I've written in numbered pieces for a long time now, but the difference about these manuals is that the reader is sent back and forth so that they never really know where they are in the book. I found that rather exciting. (Right Gas mask 1928)

I was also inspired by computers, of course—the way you click yourself through from one file to another and from one page on the net to another page. My book is organised in a similar way.

G: By writing it in that way you've produced a very different kind of book to read. SL: Yes, it it is meant to give the reader a new kind of reading experience G: What did you hope that experience would be? When you were envisaging your reader did you have a kind of ideal response in mind? (Left Paris 1909)

SL: I did: I hoped that history would not be experienced as a foregone conclusion, that the reader would get to experience the uncertainty of history, because history while it's actually happening is always uncertain, isn't it, one doesn't know at the time how things are going to turn out.

G: Is that what you are hinting at in your passage about how everyone took the arrival of bombing for granted just as they took getting a glass of milk out of the fridge for granted—when actually, as you say, you took the milk 'not from the refriger- ator, because they didn't exist yet, but from the taken-for-granted icebox. And not from a carton, because they didn't exist yet, but from the taken-for-granted pitcher.' SL: Yes: I wanted to convince the reader that everything in the past is not necessarily the same as it is now, in the present. (Right Bombing savages)

When we go back in time we tend to travel with the assumption that it's only the specific things that the historian points out that were different and that every else was the same. But in fact, in the past, everything was different. You have to realize, when you go back in time to follow a certain chain of thought or pursue a particular argument, that all around you things are happening that are very different from how things are today. I think the reader can actually have this experience when they read the book as it is constructed.

G: Did you find A History of Bombing more difficult to write than a more conventionally structured narrative?

SL: Well, I'm used to writing in this fragmentary form, in very short chapters with each chapter making a single point—maybe I was influenced by Nietzsche because much of his writing takes the same form. British Parliamentary reports were another inspiration: they consist of numbered pieces where every piece makes a single proposition, says just one thing, before going on to the next number and making a new statement. (Left London News 1911)

But at the end it was very interesting—I had this great number of short pieces, and to make the final structure took some time. It was exhilarating work.

G: Did you work out the structure at the end or did it emerge as you went along?

SL: I had an idea of what I was going to do but not a very detailed idea. I wrote certain sequences of fragments constituting an argument or a story—for instance, the sequence about the Korean war—and then when I had all the different threads I wove them together: it was the weaving together that was so exciting.

G: In the book, one of the early threads deals with your own awareness as a child of this new threat, bombing. It seems to have had a profound impact on your imagination. Was this one of the inspirations behind your decision to write about this topic? (Right New York 1902)

SL: The childhood memories are not the only personal pieces in the book—there are in fact many, many personal pieces —almost every entrance or chapter or whatever you like to call them has some personal connection. I think the most important of them all, probably, is my memory of when I first left Sweden at fifteen and went out into the world. It was a great step to take: you must remember, everything was not like it is today. Everybody had not been to Majorca or the Canary Islands. I was the first person in my family to leave Sweden—the first out of all of my relatives, the first out of all of our neighbours. Nobody I knew had ever been out of Sweden! I was Columbus, going out into the great unknown. And what did I see? I went to Germany and I saw enormous cities, cities as big as London, just razed to the ground, not a single house left standing. That was in 1947, and it was a very formative experience.

G: It's interesting that this formative memory belongs to a place outside Sweden: Sweden, after all, has been lucky enough to be largely untouched by the experience of bombing. Do you think your being Swedish has altered your perceptions in any way? SL: As a fifteen-year-old boy going out into the world for the first time, I had, of course, an immense feeling that Sweden was a safe haven: it hadn't been bombed, whereas Finland and Norway and Denmark had all been hit by the war, and Germany seemed to have been totally erased. (Left Illuminated Paris)

But I think I felt my Swedishness most in the way that we got information from both sides during the war. In the summer of 1948 I lived with a British working-class family in St Albans, outside London, and I was surprised to find that they believed that British bombers had never attacked civilians but had only hit military targets. It was a very firmly held conviction and they could not be shaken out of it by any eye-witness accounts from me. Perhaps it was necessary, in order to win the war: Britain had to make its people believe that everything they did was righteous, as did the Germans. But in Sweden and other neutral countries like Switzerland you got news from all sides, so you knew more, perhaps, about the bombing war then most other people.

G: Was it neutral news?

SL: No, very biased news of course, but from both sides and with both biases—those who read the German -oriented press would get mostly the German story and those who read the British-oriented press would get the British side of the story—but some papers carried both sides of the story. (Herndon London 1927)

G: On the subject of lack of neutrality: one thing that struck me in your book is your account of visiting various British military museums. You observe that 'the results of residential bombing are never shown'. I was surprised by this because I had thought that it was becoming an accepted practice nowadays for history to be viewed through the eyes of the victim.

SL: It's true that there have been a lot of historians writing about the bombing war, and criticizing the way that it was carried out, and seeing it from the civilian point of view: but to depict such a stance in a museum is something different. I suppose a museum is seen as more official, and it's also—like something you see on TV—designed for 'everyone'. A museum has the capacity to reach out to the wider public more than a book does, I think.

With a book you can choose to read it or not, but you tend to be taken to museums as part of your education, young children are taken by their teachers, that kind of thing.

G: Have you ever visited any museums that do show both sides of the story?

SL: I haven't seen the ideal museum in any country or on any subject! Of course there are museums that show the bombing war from the sufferers' side, from the victims' side, but then they don't, as a general rule, show the other sides' point of view. I'm thinking of certain Japanese museums: for example, the Hiroshima museum, which doesn't show the Japanese aggression, the Japanese bombing of China, the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor—in fact they're seeing themselves solely as victims.

II'm talking about some of the Australian museums that deal with the war against the Aborigines and the present situation of the Aborigines. For example, in Adelaide there is a museum of immigration that gives a lot of information about the immigrants that came to Australia but also explains that these immigrants came at the expense of the country's original inhabitants and describes what happened to them. It's morally very balanced, it's a museum that does not evade the difficult and hurtful questions.

But there are some Japanese museums that redress this: in Osaka for instance. Osaka was totally erased by the American bombing, and they have a museum that shows this and denounces it as a war crime but also denounces the Japanese war crimes committed in China, so they are trying for balance. I must say, though, that the most morally interesting museums I've seen don't deal with war at all, or deal with a very special kind of war:

I would never ask that the British should denounce themselves as murderers or anything like that, only that the moral questions inherent in the bombing war should be squarely faced and put before the public—which they still haven't been. Some television programmes have tried to address these issues, and there have been several books about the bombing war—books, for instance, about the bombing of Dresden, which was an especially horrific example of the victimization of a city. But in the museum business they have completely evaded the question, because museums have a special place in society, and a special status and also a special audience. For example, veterans tend to go to military museums, at least in the United States—the Air and Space Museum has a very patient and close following of veterans and I shouldn't be surprised if it wasn't also the case in British military museums. They have influence on museum policy, and they're outraged if anything is said that could cast a shadow on what they have been through
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The art of war

Next year marks the 70th anniversary of the destruction of Guernica. It's about time Madrid heeded the Basque demands for that painting. HERE