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The Gun Room
Dawn, mist clearing over the rice fields, a burning Vietnamese village, and a young war photographer gets the shot that might make his career. The image, of a staring soldier in the midst of mayhem, will become one of the great photographs of the war. But what he has seen in that village is more than he can bear, and he flees.
Jonathan drifts on to Japan, to lose himself in the vastness of Tokyo, where there are different kinds of pictures to be taken: peacetime pictures of crowds and subways and cherry blossom. And pictures of a girl with whom he is no longer lost: innumerable pictures of Kumiko, on the streets and in the rain and in the heat of the summer.
Yet even here in this alien city, his history will catch up with him: that photograph and his responsibility in taking it; his responsibility as a witness to war, and as a witness to other events buried far deeper in his past.
The Gun Room is a powerful exploration of image and memory, and of the moral complexity and emotional consequences of the experience of war.
Jonathan drifts on to Japan, to lose himself in the vastness of Tokyo, where there are different kinds of pictures to be taken: peacetime pictures of crowds and subways and cherry blossom. And pictures of a girl with whom he is no longer lost: innumerable pictures of Kumiko, on the streets and in the rain and in the heat of the summer.
Yet even here in this alien city, his history will catch up with him: that photograph and his responsibility in taking it; his responsibility as a witness to war, and as a witness to other events buried far deeper in his past.
The Gun Room is a powerful exploration of image and memory, and of the moral complexity and emotional consequences of the experience of war.
224 pages, Paperback
First published April 21, 2016
4 people are currently reading
657 people want to read
About the author
Georgina Harding
26 books48 followersGeorgina Harding is an English author of fiction. Published works include her novels Painter of Silence (shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012), The Spy Game (shortlisted for The Encore Award 2011), and The Solitude of Thomas Cave.
She has also written two works of non-fiction: Tranquebar: A Season in South India and In Another Europe. She lives in London and the Stour Valley, Essex.
She has also written two works of non-fiction: Tranquebar: A Season in South India and In Another Europe. She lives in London and the Stour Valley, Essex.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews
May 14, 2022
3.5 rounded down
A very gentle, quiet and introspective novel of war and dealing with the aftermath of trauma. Harding’s writing has a subtle and understated beauty to it.
Perhaps I wasn’t quite in the mood for this but I’m still keen to check out books 2 and 3 in this loose trilogy.
A very gentle, quiet and introspective novel of war and dealing with the aftermath of trauma. Harding’s writing has a subtle and understated beauty to it.
Perhaps I wasn’t quite in the mood for this but I’m still keen to check out books 2 and 3 in this loose trilogy.
July 23, 2025
3.5 stars
Read for the library challenge of a book set in a foreign country. Enjoyed this and learnt a few things about Japan, connected with it due to my family history of photography but something just didn't fully click for me (pun unintended)
Read for the library challenge of a book set in a foreign country. Enjoyed this and learnt a few things about Japan, connected with it due to my family history of photography but something just didn't fully click for me (pun unintended)
March 11, 2018
An English photojournalist witnesses a My Lai type massacre in Vietnam and afterward is haunted by the images he has seen in this novel about the psychic toll war takes. Seeking a place to escape the horror of war and feeling unready to return home, he takes refuge in Japan, teaching English and engaging in an affair with a young Japanese woman while haunted by the war images he has captured and his childhood memory of his father’s suicide. In subject matter and style it reminded me of the beginning chapter of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, another novel which tries to capture the experience of war and the toll it takes on those caught up in its violence.
June 8, 2025
This book was marvellous. There is true beauty within the character work of this book that only deepens as you reflect on the writing. It is so simple, so clean and so well woven into itself that you do not notice the framework of Jonathan's personal revelations and growth happening until he has unfurled in front of you, arms wide in the viewfinder of a camera.
This book feels like the development of a close friendship. A friend is at first a stranger, who you must decide to look at for longer, and who you must decide to learn about. Eventually, the inner workings of this friend become clear as you learn about them; how their experiences shape their fears and how these fears shape their experiences, their negative traits and how their world has informed them, and their positive traits which have remained in spite of their world. These aspects of knowing someone are subtle, in life and within the workings of this book. They are developed slowly, in the dark, much like Jonathans photographs, and can only be appreciated once you allow them into the light that comes with truly knowing someone. This is the journey the book takes you on with Jonathan; a slow dripping of intimate knowledge into a sea of mundane life, building to create a collage of all that is known of him.
This book feels like the development of a close friendship. A friend is at first a stranger, who you must decide to look at for longer, and who you must decide to learn about. Eventually, the inner workings of this friend become clear as you learn about them; how their experiences shape their fears and how these fears shape their experiences, their negative traits and how their world has informed them, and their positive traits which have remained in spite of their world. These aspects of knowing someone are subtle, in life and within the workings of this book. They are developed slowly, in the dark, much like Jonathans photographs, and can only be appreciated once you allow them into the light that comes with truly knowing someone. This is the journey the book takes you on with Jonathan; a slow dripping of intimate knowledge into a sea of mundane life, building to create a collage of all that is known of him.
September 4, 2019
I absolutely adored this book for so many reasons, and it will definitely be a book I shall re-read in years to come. Opening in the killing fields of Vietnam where a photographer takes the defining war photograph of his career, but suffers a classic case of PTSD in its aftermath. Moving between Vietnam, Japan. and Jonathan’s former life back home in rural England, Harding depicts all three locations in panoramic detail, capturing the essence of nature and setting against these beautiful backdrops the futility and destruction of war, turbulent relationships, and exploring notions of home. The language just flows through the reader, the descriptions present themselves as technicolour photographs, and the exploration of Johnathon’s life and emotions is poignant and resonates with emotion. Quite simply a beautiful book.
October 9, 2025
It was an okay book, I felt like there wasn’t much of a story and nothing really happened. I’m glad it was a short book as I would’ve given up reading it otherwise
January 24, 2019
Exquisite.
A sad tale but told with gentleness and insight. By accident I read The Land of the Living first, though it has only been published recently, and this second. Chronologically this book comes second dealing with the son of the main character in Land of the Living.
I think she's a wonderful novelist.
A sad tale but told with gentleness and insight. By accident I read The Land of the Living first, though it has only been published recently, and this second. Chronologically this book comes second dealing with the son of the main character in Land of the Living.
I think she's a wonderful novelist.
November 10, 2017
From my review in The Brooklyn Rail:
New writers are often bombarded with rules. On my Master’s I was instructed to introduce dialogue on page one; to keep paragraphs short, and sentences shorter; to avoid, at all costs, embedded speech; and never, ever, to report more than one speaker in a single paragraph.
Georgina Harding, Orange Prize-shortlisted novelist, is no new writer, and she breaks every one of these rules (and almost certainly others) in the very first pages of The Gun Room: long sentences drive paragraphs across whole pages, with speeches – when dialogue at last occurs, on page 11 – stacked and embedded. The effect is frankly glorious.
Harding’s hero, Jonathan, is a fledgling British war photographer working out of late-60s Saigon. His first trip to the front is supposed to be a milk-run; instead he is the sole press witness to a vicious massacre (never specifically named as Mỹ Lai). The Gun Room practically explodes open with the event, a nearly stream-of-consciousness prose-poem immersion that is engaging and chilling, overwhelming the reader with the rush and confusion of Jonathan’s experience.
Jonathan sells the photos to an international magazine. His portrait of a dazed American solider, “face blackened and smeared with war,” appears on the cover. The money earned lets him steer his life from bang to whimper: he escapes to Tokyo, where he will spend nearly the entire novel teaching English, shooting (note the word) pictures of flowers and commuters, and dating Kumiko, the admin at the language school. The prose reflects this change, becoming more traditional, reverting only during Jonathan’s occasional, image-triggered flashbacks. These include a kind of synesthesia, in which photographs evoke for him the smells of flowers, blood, or sex.
Jonathan’s life in Tokyo is a reflection of his post-traumatic apathy. He floats through the days, wandering about, sometimes recalling his family and their farm in Norfolk. He takes pictures but is aware that “the camera makes the photographer behind it invisible.” He has limited initiative, although he tends to be kind, if ineffective, for example making a brief attempt to look in on a “salaryman” student who has lost his job.
It seems things could go on like this forever, but for a rather implausible coincidence: he runs into Jim, the GI he photographed, on a Tokyo train platform. They become friends of a sort, but Jonathan is really only waiting for the opportunity to admit what he considers his “guilt” as the photographer who made Jim infamous. His confession ends their brief friendship, and brings trouble to Jonathan’s relationship with Kumiko.
War, clearly, is the heart of the story, but it is also insistently avoided by characters and author alike, a hole at the center of everyone’s experience once the opening scenes are past. Like Jonathan’s father, Kumiko’s grandfather fought in the jungles of Burma in WWII, but, just as Jonathan hides his war photos from Kumiko and Jim hides his identity by moving to Japan, neither really speaks of it.
Jonathan’s father, ostensibly the victor, never recovers, and commits suicide when his sons are children, while Kumiko’s grandfather, defeated, lives a long life, but one that might lack happiness. It is hard to know from what we are shown if the grandfather’s sudden disregard for his health is a long-delayed result of the war: we have only Jonathan’s interpretation of events, mostly as told to him by Kumiko.
It is equally unclear if this disregard represents acceptance of death or rejection of life. While it perhaps makes no real difference in terms of outcome, some recognition that the two are not transposable positions would suggest a deeper engagement with the peripheral characters – and with the exception of Jonathan, they are all, ultimately, peripheral. It’s the novel’s most important feature but also its greatest limitation that the central character is withdrawn and foreign, unable and unwilling to engage deeply with things until it is almost too late.
Readers can surely find ways to argue intention – it’s an elision designed to highlight Jonathan’s alienation, or to showcase an Eastern ease with ambivalence versus obsessive Western categorization. Is it then a quality or a flaw if the reader is trapped with Jonathan on a surface beyond which he rarely allows himself to look? And if Jonathan’s eyes and camera lens are both a form of Western gaze, what of the novel that presents them? More beautiful perhaps than her prose is the fact that Harding is ambitious enough to risk such questions.
New writers are often bombarded with rules. On my Master’s I was instructed to introduce dialogue on page one; to keep paragraphs short, and sentences shorter; to avoid, at all costs, embedded speech; and never, ever, to report more than one speaker in a single paragraph.
Georgina Harding, Orange Prize-shortlisted novelist, is no new writer, and she breaks every one of these rules (and almost certainly others) in the very first pages of The Gun Room: long sentences drive paragraphs across whole pages, with speeches – when dialogue at last occurs, on page 11 – stacked and embedded. The effect is frankly glorious.
Harding’s hero, Jonathan, is a fledgling British war photographer working out of late-60s Saigon. His first trip to the front is supposed to be a milk-run; instead he is the sole press witness to a vicious massacre (never specifically named as Mỹ Lai). The Gun Room practically explodes open with the event, a nearly stream-of-consciousness prose-poem immersion that is engaging and chilling, overwhelming the reader with the rush and confusion of Jonathan’s experience.
Jonathan sells the photos to an international magazine. His portrait of a dazed American solider, “face blackened and smeared with war,” appears on the cover. The money earned lets him steer his life from bang to whimper: he escapes to Tokyo, where he will spend nearly the entire novel teaching English, shooting (note the word) pictures of flowers and commuters, and dating Kumiko, the admin at the language school. The prose reflects this change, becoming more traditional, reverting only during Jonathan’s occasional, image-triggered flashbacks. These include a kind of synesthesia, in which photographs evoke for him the smells of flowers, blood, or sex.
Jonathan’s life in Tokyo is a reflection of his post-traumatic apathy. He floats through the days, wandering about, sometimes recalling his family and their farm in Norfolk. He takes pictures but is aware that “the camera makes the photographer behind it invisible.” He has limited initiative, although he tends to be kind, if ineffective, for example making a brief attempt to look in on a “salaryman” student who has lost his job.
It seems things could go on like this forever, but for a rather implausible coincidence: he runs into Jim, the GI he photographed, on a Tokyo train platform. They become friends of a sort, but Jonathan is really only waiting for the opportunity to admit what he considers his “guilt” as the photographer who made Jim infamous. His confession ends their brief friendship, and brings trouble to Jonathan’s relationship with Kumiko.
War, clearly, is the heart of the story, but it is also insistently avoided by characters and author alike, a hole at the center of everyone’s experience once the opening scenes are past. Like Jonathan’s father, Kumiko’s grandfather fought in the jungles of Burma in WWII, but, just as Jonathan hides his war photos from Kumiko and Jim hides his identity by moving to Japan, neither really speaks of it.
Jonathan’s father, ostensibly the victor, never recovers, and commits suicide when his sons are children, while Kumiko’s grandfather, defeated, lives a long life, but one that might lack happiness. It is hard to know from what we are shown if the grandfather’s sudden disregard for his health is a long-delayed result of the war: we have only Jonathan’s interpretation of events, mostly as told to him by Kumiko.
It is equally unclear if this disregard represents acceptance of death or rejection of life. While it perhaps makes no real difference in terms of outcome, some recognition that the two are not transposable positions would suggest a deeper engagement with the peripheral characters – and with the exception of Jonathan, they are all, ultimately, peripheral. It’s the novel’s most important feature but also its greatest limitation that the central character is withdrawn and foreign, unable and unwilling to engage deeply with things until it is almost too late.
Readers can surely find ways to argue intention – it’s an elision designed to highlight Jonathan’s alienation, or to showcase an Eastern ease with ambivalence versus obsessive Western categorization. Is it then a quality or a flaw if the reader is trapped with Jonathan on a surface beyond which he rarely allows himself to look? And if Jonathan’s eyes and camera lens are both a form of Western gaze, what of the novel that presents them? More beautiful perhaps than her prose is the fact that Harding is ambitious enough to risk such questions.
September 23, 2017
What a brilliant book in so many ways. The plot returns to the motifs so many times and he title finally becomes clear. There is so much in it about war, privacy, photography...the way the photographer sees something differently to the rest of us, does he have the right to take photos of people. The language is beautiful...the descriptions of people and places. I so identified with the feeling of not wanting to be foreign anymore and I imagine this must really be the case somewhere like Japan where it is so obvious. Solid blocks of writing and dialogue without punctuation that just seems to flow on from the descriptions.
June 20, 2017
This was a very descriptive book with lots of beautiful details about the landscapes of foreign countries. It was also about the effect of war and what it seems to do to the human psyche and also how that can be captured in something as simple as a photograph. Pictures do speak a thousand words, and this book just proves that point. Great read!
July 13, 2023
Georgina Harding is the author the Orange Prize shortlisted
Painter of Silence (2012),
and I have Kim from Reading Matters to thank for introducing me to this fine author. The Gun Room (2016) is Harding's fourth novel, and I have her Land of the Living (2018) on the TBR too.
I suppose we have the marketing department to thank for the misleading cover design. There is a Japanese girl in the novel, and yes, she does travel on trains, and indeed it does rain a lot, but the book is actually about a traumatised young war photographer. A cover design featuring him would probably attract a different sort of gung-ho readership, but that might be no bad thing since the book reveals the cost of war long after the last shot has been fired.
Anyway...
Jonathan has made his name and a lot of money out of his photographs of a war crime during the Vietnam War. (The My Lai Massacre is never mentioned, but it would be in most readers' minds, and those of us of a certain age will have vivid memories of the photos we saw at the time.) Jonathan was young and naïve and utterly unprepared for what he might see, but he manages to capture that same sense of shock and horror in one of the soldiers — who witnessed, and possibly participated in the atrocity. Jonathan remains haunted by what he has seen, and abandoning his brother and widowed mother on the family farm in England, he travels in Asia, trying to exorcise his demons.
He fetches up in Tokyo, where the order and restraint and predictability of what he sees brings him some solace. He gets work teaching English, and he meets a girl called Kumiko, who shows him the sights and introduces him to her family. With whom he is careful not to mention that his father hated the Japanese because he had fought against them in Burma... where Kumiko's grandfather was a soldier too.
In Painter of Silence, the main character is a deaf-mute, and there are many silences in this novel too.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/07/14/t...
I suppose we have the marketing department to thank for the misleading cover design. There is a Japanese girl in the novel, and yes, she does travel on trains, and indeed it does rain a lot, but the book is actually about a traumatised young war photographer. A cover design featuring him would probably attract a different sort of gung-ho readership, but that might be no bad thing since the book reveals the cost of war long after the last shot has been fired.
Anyway...
Jonathan has made his name and a lot of money out of his photographs of a war crime during the Vietnam War. (The My Lai Massacre is never mentioned, but it would be in most readers' minds, and those of us of a certain age will have vivid memories of the photos we saw at the time.) Jonathan was young and naïve and utterly unprepared for what he might see, but he manages to capture that same sense of shock and horror in one of the soldiers — who witnessed, and possibly participated in the atrocity. Jonathan remains haunted by what he has seen, and abandoning his brother and widowed mother on the family farm in England, he travels in Asia, trying to exorcise his demons.
He fetches up in Tokyo, where the order and restraint and predictability of what he sees brings him some solace. He gets work teaching English, and he meets a girl called Kumiko, who shows him the sights and introduces him to her family. With whom he is careful not to mention that his father hated the Japanese because he had fought against them in Burma... where Kumiko's grandfather was a soldier too.
In Painter of Silence, the main character is a deaf-mute, and there are many silences in this novel too.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/07/14/t...
August 25, 2020
Purchase The Gun Room here for just $8!
The effects of war are felt by everyone- including war photographers. This is the story of one such photographer on a mission to escape his past. This is a powerful exploration of image and memory, and the complexities of war.
Anastasia - The Book Grocer
The effects of war are felt by everyone- including war photographers. This is the story of one such photographer on a mission to escape his past. This is a powerful exploration of image and memory, and the complexities of war.
Anastasia - The Book Grocer
February 2, 2022
The authors ability to make me feel as though I am the character and am merely watching my life through the haze was incredible. 5/5 for that.
That being said, it didn’t leave me feeling very connected with the main character. I can recognize that feeling, but not in that detail and for that length of time.
The disconnection is why I am rating this a 3/5. Still a good read, but not my personal preference.
That being said, it didn’t leave me feeling very connected with the main character. I can recognize that feeling, but not in that detail and for that length of time.
The disconnection is why I am rating this a 3/5. Still a good read, but not my personal preference.
August 25, 2017
A simple story that sheds life on how profound the impact of war can be. Additionally, kind of interesting that Japan plays a central role for the British and American characters in being a place to escape or try to process their Vietnam War experiences. There seemed to be a significant number of expats in Japan running from something.....
August 2, 2019
An exquisite read. War photographer Jonathan witnesses a situation in Vietnam he cannot get out of his mind. In order to come to terms with his traumatic experience, he travels around in Asia and ends up settling down for a while in Japan. The story unfolds with gentleness and reveals deep human insights in a bare-to-the-bone manner.
January 24, 2018
War images Jonathan photographed in Vietnam haunt him so he flees in Japan. Once he meets Jim, a war veteran, and Kumiko's grandfather, he discovers the generational effects of war in both his native England and Japan. This helps him uncover the mystery of his father's death.
An important story
An important story
May 29, 2023
A very different read for myself!
It was enticing amd entriguing, yet distant and cold!
To see the marvelous landscape of Japan throughout the seasons in the detailed descriptions, yet to be able to imagine the Vietnam war in it's horrific display too; is astounding!
It was enticing amd entriguing, yet distant and cold!
To see the marvelous landscape of Japan throughout the seasons in the detailed descriptions, yet to be able to imagine the Vietnam war in it's horrific display too; is astounding!
October 17, 2023
3.5 stars, a very subtle and gentle book. The main character talks about being an outsider and watching the people/life around him; this was described well and I was able to feel it through the writing, however this also meant I did not feel super attached to him.
July 6, 2017
The writing is absolutely beautiful. There were several occasions when it took my breath away. This book will make you stop and think, but I doubt I will remember it in a few months time.
August 1, 2017
A beautiful piece I will remember
May 2, 2019
This was very spare and subtle. There is a lot to unpack and talk about--much more than the book's short length would indicate.
July 10, 2019
A beautiful read.
Filled with the art of photography.
The story knitted well but came too late.
Filled with the art of photography.
The story knitted well but came too late.
September 26, 2022
A beautiful concept but I felt the language got really dull and repetitive, maybe more plot twists would have broken up the monotone well.
December 19, 2021
Very descriptive writing, but ultimately not much happens in the story. I stayed interested hoping more would happen, but ultimately it fell flat.
February 27, 2017
Haunting. Emotional. As a photographer and a writer, this book made me think about my own quest to record memories via photographs and writing to be "invisible" (126) behind the lens or pen. "There are images that stay like stains on the memory" (26, Harding's paraphrase of a quote by Diane Arbus). I wonder about the efficacy of photographs and writing in the ways in which they render these images, and how memories of someone are forever saved in even the smallest photograph.
February 12, 2017
Reading Georgina Harding's book, "The Gun Room"was like floating through space and time with no agenda...just watching. The main character, a young photographer, begins his photographic journey in the horror of a Vietnam slaughter and moves on in shock, later reviewing his own father's painful reactions to the US-Japanese war. The underlying message of the permanent, destructive trauma WAR brings to all....the fighters, the victims, those viewing it, as well as the broader culture lays like a fog over everything. There is much flowery prose of the photographer as he eyes everything, seldom really entering life as a whole person and as much destroyed by war as anyone, although he never held a gun.
March 2, 2018
a touching yet profound book about the lasting effects of war on the human soul. The story centers around a young photographer who takes a picture of a young soldier in Vietnam following a raid on a Vietnamese village. The photo goes on to be published, leaving our photographer haunted by the memory. He will not return home, but travels to Japan to immerse himself in a place far from home and memories.
The author gives us a glimpse into the mind set of a photographer allowing us to see "the world thru his eyes or the eyes of the camera"
Much later in the story our main character runs into another american visiting Japan , it is here the story takes some twists and turns.
I enjoyed this book, found it to be an easy read.
The author gives us a glimpse into the mind set of a photographer allowing us to see "the world thru his eyes or the eyes of the camera"
Much later in the story our main character runs into another american visiting Japan , it is here the story takes some twists and turns.
I enjoyed this book, found it to be an easy read.
July 23, 2016
I kept reading hoping this book would be more but was disappointed that my perseverance was not rewarded. Having lived in Japan I felt like the descriptions of Tokyo and Japanese life had been cut and pasted from guide books, and the links between the key characters was not well formed and so cliched. The basic premise of the book had such potential but each time I thought the story was gaining some momentum it fell flat. Such a disappointing read.
November 10, 2016
The Gun Room is a gently poetic, understated novel, not only about war and trauma and healing, but about creativity in how the experiences that have shaped us impact on where we direct our gaze, and about how being an outsider can be integral to our identity if we feel estranged from our own biographies.
Full review http://annegoodwin.weebly.com/annecdo...
Full review http://annegoodwin.weebly.com/annecdo...
November 19, 2016
I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway. My opinion is just that...mine, and completely unbiased.
At once graceful and quiet, but teaming with underlying angst just waiting to burst forth. The challenge to your visual skills, both beautiful and horrific, is prevalent throughout. A haunting, emotional tale.
At once graceful and quiet, but teaming with underlying angst just waiting to burst forth. The challenge to your visual skills, both beautiful and horrific, is prevalent throughout. A haunting, emotional tale.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews