Remember to lead with the principal facts. We dont want anything clever. Remember,history gets written from newspapers, the head of the newsroom where Owen Simmons worked as a reporter tells him. After the editor has walked away,the young,cynical Simmons mutters a For Gods sake under his breath. But in Not Untrue and Not Unkind,Ed OLoughlin does just that. This is an attempt at writing fiction through what OLoughlin has seen of his job as a reporter and of his dispatches from war-weary Africa for the Irish Times and other newspapers. So Simmons,with his view of journalists and journalism,with his job of messing with other peoples copies,could easily be OLoughlin himself. In the book,Simmons escapes his office politics and Cartwright,the bullying newsroom head,to freelance in Africa. Here,in a land ripped apart by genocide and refugee crises,Simmons finds company in a bunch of other correspondents and photographers who are there on similar assignments. The novel is set in the last few years of Mobutus regime in Congo. The politics of Africa and the horrors of a continent wracked by civil wars form a haunting background. But the novel is unmistakably about the journalists,the TV network pussies,the photographers (the lens monkeys),deadlines,and star correspondents or the big foots who are parachuted into trouble spots and who hijack the scene from the local correspondents before flying home. And when OLoughlin brings out the horrors of war,he does so with strange detachment and with very little colour,a term the journalists in the book use to describe softer,feature stories as opposed to news. The detachment probably comes from having been there and having witnessed the war. A particularly horrifying incident is where the journalists chance upon a pit latrine,where massacred bodies of men,women and children lay in a rotting pile,and when they help an old woman bury her granddaughters body. If OLoughlins debut work,longlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize,falls in the genre of journalistic novels,its definitely more journalistic than novel. OLoughlin is best when he talks about the newsroom,its quirks and its cynicism. Towards the end of the novel,when Simmons wants to bail out of Africa,he says his newspaper wants him to leave Africa because the focus had shifted to Iraq and the market for African wars had suddenly vanished. But OLoughlin/Simmons does come up with some great lines,the kind his editor would have said was too clever for us if it had been in a news report. Like when Simmons finds himself in a spot when asked about his secret affair with a fellow journalist in Africa and thinks,Only in chess do people resign when they know things are hopeless. In life,we use up all our pieces.
