Not Untrue & Not Unkind by Ed O’Loughlin (Penguin)
The information age has radically changed journalism. Back then, before Google, YouTube, Twitter and cellphones, journalists went out to gather news. But, increasingly, news reports are the result of a search on the internet, a press conference, rewriting of a press release and the obligatory “verifying” phone call.
This explains why there’s a genuine buzz in a newsroom when there’s a major news event, such as last year’s xenophobia attacks.
It’s not difficult to see why; it’s not enough just to phone an “analyst” or rewrite a press release or wire copy. There’s a certain amount of depth when you’ve seen the action, talked to ordinary people and spin doctors.
Before the internet age, the nature of foreign correspondents’ jobs meant they had to go out quite a lot, mixing country and regional travel. After a few years, most of them would be able to cobble together a novel based on experiences scribbled in the journals they kept. Not Untrue & Not Unkind — a novel about a group of foreign journalists covering Africa — could have been the result of such a process. (O’Loughlin was a foreign correspondent for the Irish Times.)
It’s principally about its protagonist scribbler Owen and a gregarious group of journalists and photographers who are stationed in South Africa around the late 1990s and from where they cover trouble spots in Africa (indeed, Africa is one country) such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone and Rwanda.
A lot of the action takes place in the Congo. And most of the time the reader wants to weep for the Congo, a land given so much, but with so little to show for it.
The Congo supplies the world with lithium, used in laptop batteries, yet the majority of Congolese will never be able to type their names on computers. It also supplies the world with coltan, used in every cellphone, yet most Congo citizens remain cut off from the rest of the world.
Nowhere is the metaphor of the rape played out more powerfully than in an incident in Goma when Owen’s group of journalists loot from one of Mobutu Sese Seko’s palaces. When one of the journalists calls out: “You do realise that by rights all of this stuff belongs to the people of Zaire,” no one replies. And no one can, ever since Belgium’s King Leopold developed an interest in the Congo.
Perhaps the problem with the Congo is that it’s too big (we are always told that it’s the size of Western Europe). While stationed there, the narrator remarks: “It’s a big place, the Congo; the maps you see don’t do it justice. The Kivus have more to do with East Africa, with the Swahili Coast, than they do with Kinshasa, which is really a West African town…”. Perhaps this is why an army captain could say to the journalists: “The government is in Kinshasa. This is Lubumbashi.”
The novel moves alternately swiftly and slowly depending on what the author is trying to do. I felt at times it moved too slowly, that a lot of colour had been included gratuitously. The author has a great eye for detail. Like an eagle, he misses nothing, but at times the descriptions are drawn out and florid.
As you would expect in a book written by a journalist, the narrator bemoans the state of today’s journalism when budgets are being slashed. Flat Earth News, a book by Nick Davies about the state of British journalism, found out that only 12% of the content of British papers is material that a reporter has actually found out and checked. The rest is sanctioned plagiarism (rewriting of wire copy) and public relations spin.
In Not Untrue & Not Unkind there is Fred, a radio reporter stationed in the DRC, who is very good at the kind of “journalism” that Davies accurately described as “churnalism”. He hardly ventures from his darkened hotel room, where he watches TV, reads wire print-outs and then reports back to London. His colleagues are aghast. “It’s like he’s not there anymore. He’s become a conduit. Some kind of portal.”
A member of the group, Charlie Brereton, responds: “We have seen the future.”
The journalists also watch the vicissitudes of African politics. The people who cheer you today might have no interest when your time is up. “The people of the city had cheered the president in December and jeered him in April, but now they just stood and watched him go.”
At times the accounts are moving and there is certain poignancy in the examination of the life of the gregarious reporter. Take Brereton, who has lived in Bulawayo, Durban, London and Dorset.
“How many times and in how many ways can a person be exiled?” the narrator wonders. And what does it do to those having to cover Africa’s “malaises” to satisfy the West’s (voyeuristic) fascination?
One day you are in Rwanda, the scene of one of the worst genocides of recent times; the next you are in the Congo; another month and you are dodging bullets fired by child soldiers in West Africa.
And so it goes.
This first novel is at once gritty and moving, set as it is at that point where the personal and the professional fatally meet. Long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, Not Untrue & Not Unkind has its own unique grace and authority.