LE PORTRAIT MAGAZINE MARCH-SEPTEMBER ISSUE | Page 41

Harry Parker: explores ideas of conflict through the voices of inanimate
objects. Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer
It’s a fate that Tom Barnes, the central character, meets too, and his
journey from troop leader to amputee is the emotional heart of the novel.
In a startling chapter written from the perspective of a bed, Tom returns
to his family home after undergoing rehab in hospital. As he starts
washing his body, including his “stumps and groin”, with a cold flannel,
the full horror of what has occurred hits him and he breaks down in
tears. “I feel like I’ve been chosen for a main part I never wanted to play
and everyone’s come to watch,” Tom tells his shocked mother. By the
end of the chapter, there’s a feeling of catharsis as Tom concludes that,
on balance, he wouldn’t change a thing that has happened to him. That
was one of the most autobiographical sections of the whole novel,
Parker tells me. “That scene happened to me about 10 weeks after I’d
got the injuries,” he says. “When I wrote ‘I wouldn’t change a thing’, I
definitely felt that. And I feel that more over time, but you have a bad
morning when your legs aren’t working properly and you’re instantly
jolted back to the time when you got injured.”
You could chuck the chapters into the air and read them in any order –
that’s what it’s like to be blown up
Although Parker had written when he was in the army (“blackly comic
stuff, like slightly amusing ways of dying”), it was some time before he
wrote about his life-altering experiences on the battlefield.
“I had a big resistance to writing about my injuries,” he says. “No one
with any sort of disability wants to be defined by their injuries .” He
wanted to be seen as someone who could write and not “a legless bloke
who wrote a book”.
It took an army-funded creative writing course in 2013 to help him make
peace with addressing what had happened to him in Afghanistan. During
the course, he wrote about conflict from the point of view of various
animals and of a tourniquet, then Anatomy of a Soldier began to take
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