Argentinean prisoners of war at Port Stanley in 1982. Photograph: Martin Cleaver/PA
I've just finished reading a truly remarkable book: b>Malvinas Requiem by Rodolfo Fogwill. Despite first appearing in Argentina shortly before the end of the Falklands War in 1982, the translated edition was only published by Serpent's Tail this year, to mark its - and the war's - 25th anniversary. It's the story of a group of young Argentine conscripts who desert during the war, a blackly comic tale that feels peculiarly British in tone.
b>Fogwill is something of a media celebrity in Argentina; an entrepreneur, columnist, market research guru and regular talking head on TV. With this book he has delivered the definitive fictionalised account of the Falklands conflict. But it rather begs the question: where is all the rest? Twenty-five years after the war ended, where are the great works of art inspired by it? Despite the fact it looms large in the British psyche (certainly of anyone in their 30s or over), the war has so far produced surprisingly little of merit from this country's writers. There are plenty of fine, riveting non-fiction accounts from those who went to the South Atlantic. But as for fiction? There was a half-decent BBC4 Production in 2002 (b>The Falklands Play). But that was an exception. Despite being ripe for exploration onscreen, the conflict is more commonly used as a back story for a clichéd peripheral figure - such as Eddie, the psycho veteran played by rent-a-mod Phil Daniels in Nick Love's hit and miss b>Goodbye Charlie Bright. Shane Meadows treated similar themes with a far greater degree of subtlety in b>This is England - but once more the war was lurking in the background as a psychological device for Shaun (Thomas Turgoose). It's not a film about the Falklands by any stretch of the imagination.
The world of music has at least produced two classics on the subject: Robert Wyatt's 1983 hit b>Shipbuilding (written by Elvis Costello) dealt with the dilemma of war alleviating unemployment in Thatcher's Britain in lines dripping with pathos ("Somebody said that someone got filled in / For saying that people get killed in / The result of this shipbuilding"). Meanwhile, Roger Water's last album with Pink Floyd, b>Final Cut, released in the same year, used the war as a stepping-off point for a concept album on the topics of militarism and globalisation.
But that's about it. Hardly a decent return on a quarter of a century of soul searching. Books as good as Fogwill's - and indeed songs as good as Costello's - force us to ask important questions of ourselves. One of the best lines in Malvinas Requiem comes when a conscript surveys the barren, windswept Falklands landscape and says, "You'd have to be English to want this." Lest we forget, it was once something people died over. Whether they died for a principle worth upholding or for misguided political ends, we owe them their story.
