Ed O’Loughlin on Not Untrue and Not Unkind
‘Africa was a very exciting and moving place to work’
Congratulations on being longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2009. This is your debut novel and you have authors such as Anne Enright (Man Booker winner in 2007) describing it as ‘the most exciting first novel I have read in many years.' You must be delighted that your first novel has been so well received?
I'm very pleased with the book's reception to date. Even before the Booker Prize listing there were a number of good reviews and very kind endorsements by Anne Enright, Christopher Hope and Joseph O'Neill. It's very hard for a first- time fiction author to reach a wide readership, and I've been very fortunate so far.
In your mid-twenties you began working as one of the youngest foreign correspondents at The Irish Times, working in Africa in the 1990s. Did you know at the time that this might make a great backdrop for a novel?
I suspect that most reporters size up their assignments as possible background material for future books - it's a sort of game we play, if nothing else. Africa was a very exciting and moving place to work, and I'm sure the thought must have been at the back of my mind from around the time I arrived there. But the idea of writing about a group of journalists in Africa, rather than about some aspect of that continent itself, came much later, when I was already planning to leave.
Owen Simmons is the foreign correspondent at the heart of your novel and because of your journalistic career in Africa the novel has been described as ‘authoritative'. Have you had a hard time trying to persuade readers that certain characters are not based on real-life foreign correspondents?
People do tend to ask me whether particular characters in the book are based on famous real people, probably because so much of the incident in the book is based closely on reality. But most of the main characters in the book are the kind of obscure freelance journalists whom nobody would have heard of, even at the time (the mid to late 1990s). And the "famous" characters are only ever alluded to in the background, they don't actually participate in the book's action. In any case, none of the characters, with a couple of minor and obscure exceptions, is based directly on a real person. I include the narrator in that.
What do you think drives journalists and photographers to a war zone? Do you think it takes a certain kind of person to take on these posts?
I think that foreign correspondents are as diverse as any other class of people. One thing which they all tend to have in common is a taste for travel, but of course lots of non-correspondents have that too. Another is a willingness to accept a certain amount of danger from time to time (although generally a lot less than the movies would have you believe: it is not a journalist's job to get injured or killed). A third, I suspect, is a secret inclination to romanticize themselves - like some of the characters in my book. Probably the most important, though, is opportunity: generally speaking, you either need to work very hard or to get a lucky break, and usually both, to get into the foreign end of the trade and to stay there. Once they have had a taste of it, most journalists want more.
You're now living back in Ireland with a young family. Are you now writing full-time - and (if so) do you ever get a yearning to go and chase down a foreign story?
I am now a full-time writer, for better or for worse. I plan to do more journalism in the future, but I have no desire to go back to working a full-time foreign beat. There comes a time when you find you can reduce any story at all to a simple formula, or template, in which you need do little more than change the names, dates and nature of the problem or crisis. That's probably the time to go.
It's reported that you've finished your second novel. Can you tell us a bit more about this?
I don't want to say much about the second novel, because nobody else has read it yet, and it might turn out to be dreadful. It's very different from the first one one - shorter, more political and much more plot-driven. And it's probably not set in Africa.
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(Interview by Sophie Rochester)
