On the bus of truth and sorrow

On the bus, you find the truth," writes James Pettifer. His unashamedly partisan account of his experiences as a reporter in Kosova during the 1990s is laced with bus journeys through a country heading for war. Pettifer is rhapsodic about the Kosovatrans buses: "big, dirty, dented and paint-scratched," he admits, but also "like veins transporting life through the body of Kosova". He is equally enraptured by the landscape.

"Every hill, shed and dwarf oak tree," he writes, "intensified my sense of affinity, engaged with my longing." It is a love affair with a place and its people that gives the book an intense empathy for its subject. At times, it can also tilt Pettifer's reporting in directions that push the limits of journalism.

Kosova Express gives a vivid sense of the nightmarish slide into war, meditating on "the nature of modern peace and war" and "the difficulty of knowing where one condition begins and the other ends".

Pettifer's first-hand accounts of "domination rituals" at Serb checkpoints cut through the meditation and romance of bus travel to convey an authentic smell of casual horror. His description of life at the Grand Hotel in Prishtina, where fear was coming "out of the cracks in the walls and running around the filthy bathroom floor with the cockroaches", has a ghastly conviction.

The book is unambiguous in its support of the Kosova Liberation Army militants - "a postmodern force" - and critical of the cautious politicking of Ibrahim Rugova. On occasions, the commitment can feel more like advocacy. He tells of travelling to Kosova with $2,000 stitched into his Barbour jacket for a family in Prishtina. "I gathered that I was regarded by some in the Foreign Office security scene as an Albanian spy," he writes. There is an uncomfortable passage in the book where Pettifer celebrates the AK-47, "a legendary weapon" that "sends a magic chill down the arm that holds it". As he acknowledges, "the question naturally arises whether this kind of partisan activity is compatible with journalistic work". Pettifer answers with the insistence that Tory governments have consistently supported Slobodan Milosevic and "the Serb barbarians".

The author's struggles with politicians are matched by his battles with editors and critics in London. He records how "the summer of 1997 passed in a flurry of controversy, writs, personal attacks and good stories". But through it all, Pettifer's commitment to recording the gathering tragedy in Kosova is unswerving. He writes: "I felt an onerous sense of responsibility to try and convey to the outside world the depths to which Kosova was sinking." Returning again and again, risking dangerous roads in those beloved buses, Pettifer pursues his story with obsessive dedication. When war finally comes in 1999, aware that he would be "arrested - or worse" if Serb forces found him in Kosova - Pettifer decides to work in the refugee camps in Macedonia and Albania. His passionate book ends at a Kosovar graveside "in the new Kosova, which is awaiting its independence".

Leslie Woodhead is a documentary film-maker, who made a film for the BBC on the tenth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre.