The Unkindest Cut

For a literary author there is no bigger prize than the Man Booker. Ireland punches above its weight for literature’s most prestigious prize and this year three Irish authors have made the long list – Colm Tóibín for Brooklyn, William Trevor for Love and Summer and former Irish Times war correspondent Ed O’Loughlin for his debut novel, Not Untrue and Not Unkind.

Told through the eyes of Owen Simmons, a young Irish war correspondent, Not Untrue and Not Unkind explores the lives and relationships of a group of war correspondents as they chase stories from Johannesburg to Kinshasa.
“The narrator Owen is not me,” says O’Loughlin. “But when I started the book I wanted to make it as realistic as possible so a lot of the details are true. The stories he covers are generally stories I covered and he was in the same places as me. It like writing an historical novel – I’m a witness instead of a participant.”
For O’Loughlin, fiction made more sense than writing a factual account.
“I wanted to write novels and I had all this colour and experience which I wanted to use. I don’t think journalists’ memoirs are very interesting. If I just sat down and wrote about my time in Africa then it becomes first-person journalism and the story is about me, but that doesn’t apply when writing a novel. The novel is about the characters – it’s not a book about Africa.”
O’Loughlin, or at least Owen, is quite scathing about the ‘big foot’ reporters who fly in to cover major stories, fly out again and write best-sellers about their experiences. One such reporter is Tim Drysdale, who ‘made a fortune by turning his three-week assignments into epics of suffering and hope, with titles he stole from an English lit poetry course’.
For Owen, this is partially professional jealousy, says O’Loughlin, but he’s also having a bit of a joke with his readers. Drysdale’s latest memoir is entitled Not Untrue and Not Unkind – the last line of Philip Larkin’s poem, ‘Talking in Bed’.
For the most part O’Loughlin leaves the politics in the background. War and its hardships may be a constant presence in the lives of his characters, but it’s their camaraderie, professional jealousies and love lives on which he focuses.
After the death of a colleague in Dublin and the discovery of an old photograph, Owen reminiscences about his time in Africa, the people he met and the woman he loved. Owen’s feelings are handled obliquely; O’Loughlin prefers hints and suggestions, alluding to Owen’s feelings of love, guilt and loss. This, he says, is not a product of his reporter’s desire to stick to the facts, but more a result of his Irishness.
“Irish males tend to do that, they don’t talk directly. The book stands and falls on Owen’s voice and it’s him telling the story as much to himself as the reader. I thought it would be more powerful to have him skating around what he wants to say.”
Not Untrue and Not Unkind also explores the emotional toll of being a reporter in a war zone and the difficulties of remaining detached from suffering. Tommo, a photographer, decides he ought to put a plastic vulture in all his shots – a reference to the infamous Kevin Carter shot of the starving Sudanese girl and the vulture – because that’s what he feels he is.
“You hear from time to time about journalists adopting babies but…” hesitates O’Loughlin. “When you get into a situation like that, where you could decide to save somebody’s life – that’s almost like playing God. You pick up one person and take them off – you can actually do that – but the problem is you won’t be able to do your job, what you’re being paid to be there for. It costs a lot of money for newspapers and TV companies, and if you’re not doing your job you won’t be there for very long. NGOs are supposed to do that and even they can’t start playing God like that. They set up structures, they don’t go around picking up people from the roadside.”
Although the obvious comparison is Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, Not Untrue and Not Unkind is a very different novel.
“I’d read The Quiet American twice before but I didn’t consciously write in relation to that. Everyone writing about foreign correspondents would be aware of it, just as everyone writing about Dublin would be aware of Joyce. It’s a very, very good book, but I wasn’t trying to react to it or be like it, I just wanted to tell my own story.”
Whether or not O’Loughlin makes the short-list or wins the Booker, he’s grateful for the attention he’s already received.
“For me to get on the long list is probably almost as beneficial as for one of the established writers to actually win it. They’re already established and will be whether they win the Booker or not, but no one had heard of me a week ago. I’d actually finished the first draft of my second novel about two hours before I heard about it – that was a really good day!”