Action slows when the issues get this thorny

MANY of us who grew up during the Vietnam War remember one photograph in particular: a naked Vietnamese girl running down a country road, in flight from a napalm attack, her mouth open in abject terror and hands held out, desperately searching for comfort.

Inside the frozen time of the image, the girl will forever remain abandoned to her fate, ignored by the three uniformed soldiers walking behind her.

Over the years, I’ve often wondered whether the photographer offered protection to the desperate girl as she ran past him, though perhaps it’s unfair of me to hope he did. After all, photographers are observers, not participants. Or are they? Isn’t their choice of what subjects to frame inside their viewfinder a form of participation? Might snapping pictures of people in pain or imminent danger be an inhuman way to make a living?

Bestselling Spanish writer Arturo Perez-Reverte explores such complex ethical questions in his novel “The Painter of Battles,” and his narrative draws extensively on his experiences as a journalist covering conflicts in the Middle East, Bosnia and elsewhere.

Perez-Reverte’s protagonist is Andres Faulques, a world-weary war photographer who has retired to a 300-year-old tower on an isolated bluff on a small island off the Spanish coast. No longer able to find meaning and purpose through his camera lens, he spends his days painting a mural on his tower walls of the atrocities he has witnessed, as well as horrific images gleaned from the battle paintings he most admires. He’s convinced that it is in our nature to oppress, humiliate and kill, and his goal is to create a monumental fresco of human existence as he sees it.

One day a Croatian stranger arrives at the tower carrying a photograph that Faulques took of him in 1991, when the man was a soldier about to fight for the city of Vukovar. The picture appeared on magazine covers around the world.

The Croatian, Ivo Markovic, informs Faulques that the image -- which enhanced the photographer’s fame -- brought tragedy to his life; the Serbs who captured Markovic recognized his face, tortured him and held him prisoner for more than two years. They also raped and murdered his wife, and then stuck a bayonet in his 5-year-old son.

Coolly and calmly, Markovic then tells our protagonist that he is going to kill him for ruining his life.

The Croatian doesn’t reveal how or when he’s going to strike, and on his surprise visits to Faulques’ tower over the next few days, he engages his host in conversations about soldiering, photography, artistic responsibility and other subjects that link the pair. Their dialogue gives Faulques a chance to express his theories on art and life, and the reader soon realizes that “The Painter of Battles” is going to be a far more cerebral novel than the page-turning thrillers that have made Perez-Reverte famous.

Unfortunately, Faulques’ extensive philosophical ramblings -- as well as flashbacks to his life as a war photographer -- soon begin to impinge on the novel’s forward progress. His reminiscences focus most often on his fellow photographer and lover, Olvido Ferrera, who was killed in a bomb blast. Their extensive conversations provide Perez-Reverte with an additional chance to offer his thoughts on such widely varying topics as contemporary weaponry, human psychology and the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico.

By Page 50 or so, the novel’s philosophical ambitions and stop-and-start structure become insurmountable problems; Perez-Reverte constantly destroys the tension between his two antagonists, and as the book cuts back and forth in time, Faulques becomes more and more pompous -- and fond of platitudes.

Perez-Reverte shows little knack for finding the poetic insight that will reveal what is unique or captivating about a painting, image or person. As though to compensate, he strings adjectives and metaphors together into tangled, difficult-to-decipher sentences: “If, as art theoreticians maintained, the photograph reminded painting of what it should never do, Faulques was sure that his work in the tower reminded photography of what it was capable of suggesting, but not achieving: a vast, continuous, circular vision of a chaotic chess game, the implacable rule that governed perverse randomness -- the ambiguity of which governed things that were absolutely not fortuitous -- of the world and of life.”

Through the relationship between Faulques and Olvido, the author tries to add warmth to the story, but their dialogue is often stilted and melodramatic. While viewing a painting of sword fight, for instance, Olvido tells her lover: “When I stab you . . . I want to have my arms around you like that, looking for the chink in the steel as you bury yourself in me, or rape me, scarcely adjusting your armor.”

The evasive ending of the book leaves Perez-Reverte’s central conflict unresolved -- perhaps his way of forcing us to consider that the ethical questions that gave birth to his novel may have no definitive answer. Or perhaps it’s the ending of a novelist who, like his protagonist, has seen too many battles.

Richard Zimler is the author of several novels, including “The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon,” “Hunting Midnight” and, most recently, “Guardian of the Dawn,” which has been a bestseller in Portugal, where he lives.