Remember to lead with the principal facts. We don’t 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 God’s sake” under his breath. But in Not Untrue and Not Unkind, Ed O’Loughlin does just that. This is an attempt at writing fiction through what O’Loughlin 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 people’s copies”, could easily be O’Loughlin 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 Mobutu’s 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 O’Loughlin 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 granddaughter’s body.

... contd.