Reminiscent of Graham Greene and V.S. Naipaul, Not Untrue & Not Unkind is a provocative and timely novel about friendship, rivalry and betrayal in Africa

In Dublin, a newspaper editor called Cartwright is found dead. One of his colleagues, Owen Simmons, discovers a dossier on Cartwright's desk. And in the dossier Owen finds a photograph, which brings him back, once again, to a dusty road in Africa and to the woman he once loved... Not Untrue & Not Unkind is Owen's story—a gripping story of friendship, rivalry and betrayal among a group of journalists and photographers covering Africa's wars. A remarkably assured and mature debut, it is a tale utterly for our times.

Ten years ago I became a hero, and when I came home my old paper tookmeon again. They thought I’d be an ornament. Ten years now working four shifts a week, six hours a shift and six weeks off each year. If you can call it working. At any rate, I get paid.

It took me a while to get used to it here again, this northern estuary. Why do I say that? I’m still not used to it. It rains a lot, and there always seems to be a wind. The days and nights mill round like mismatched fighters, short and long, long and short, from summer to winter to summer again: it would make you feel dizzy. Then in September they rest for a while, leaning together, equatorial evenings, and next comes October, when the trees drop their leaves before a sky filled with remote patient light – the light of a highveld winter, following me halfway round the world. Nights come early, the low buildings shrink from them, and I remember that most of
this city is built on silt, and that out past the sea wall the waves are still hissing. It’s time then for the kids to light fireworks and bonfires, to hold the perimeter, keep the living from the dead, until November relieves us with its numbing east wind.

By then the basin behind my house is crowded with migrant birds driven down from the far north. People throw bread in the water, and the ducks and swans reward them with hustle or grace. Each to his own.

This town is, you might say, a forgiving place. Big enough to hide in, small enough to support a familiar cast of tramps, screamers and congenital syphilitics. Here people call them ‘characters’ and give them freedom of the streets. And the streets are full of stories – other people’s stories, not my own, and for ten years now that’s been fine with me. When I came back from Africa they wanted me to write again, but I told the interview panel, with a straight face, that for the time being I’d prefer to explore avenues of production and management. From time to time I still churn out the odd worthy think piece – global affairs; the big picture; filler, really, rewritten from the wires – but mostly I just mess with other people’s copy, working backbench on the night shift.

It seems, though, that Cartwright may have screwed things up for me. Hugh says he needs someone to replace Cartwright, to put manners on the newsroom, and he seems to think it’s me. Nor is my boss alone in this belief: there is a story going around that Cartwright was secretly grooming me, had been for years back, without my knowing it. And even now, knowing him as well as I did, having seen him at his weakest, as nothing at all, even I have to admit that Cartwright was somewhat uncanny. The evening he died a strange wind blew from the south and pasted rain and red mud onto every flat surface and every parked car. The rain was still falling as I left the police station, and streaks of wet dirt swallowed the blood spots on Cartwright’s folder when I took it from hiding in his old leather bag. I needed to see it again, right there on the street, outside the police station.

I went into a bar – not the usual one, this would need some privacy – and opened the folder and started to look through it. Later, when I stopped reading for a while, the TV in the corner was talking about a storm in the Sahara, dust blown thousands of miles by freak currents in the air. I ordered another drink, just for stage business, though the bar was almost empty. At the other end of the counter a barman was reading the evening newspaper in the glow of a fake carriage lamp. An old man stood in the hallway, just inside the open door, the smoke from his cigarette curling into his eyes. Above the door a fan of glass had stained the evening sky dark mauve. I’ve seen that before, I thought, and I remembered Kate, and a thunderstorm.

Cartwright’s folder was still open in front of me, at a page clipped from the New York Chronicle’s magazine, dated ten years ago. Most of the page was taken up with a single colour photograph, a picture I hadn’t seen since it was taken. I looked at it again now.

In the photograph Fine has his arm around Tommo’s shoulder and the two of them are leaning against a blue Mitsubishi. Funny. I don’t remember it being that colour. I could have sworn that it was green. Tommo is frowning a little, his arms folded across his chest. He thought it unlucky for colleagues to take each other’s pictures. Fine is smiling, but with that faintly puzzled look which, for years now, has been all that I can see of him. It was the look that just about saved him from seeming too arrogant. To the left stands little Charlie Brereton, the image on his T-shirt still stained with blood and snot. Behind him, beyond the Mitsubishi, appears the cab of an old Bedford army truck, punched through with bullet holes. The crude swastika painted on its door seems to grow from the back of Brereton’s balding head, and he is leering at the camera like he means to start a fight with it. Off to the right, just a little apart from Fine, stands Beatrice. She is staring at the camera, staring out of the photograph. She is staring at me. I took the picture, with Tommo’s favourite camera.

I closed the folder and thought for a while. More people had come in – a girl and a boy, a group of young men in suits with hot red faces, two ladies with shopping bags looking for gin. I had to stare past the TV so as not to seem alone. It was talking about the dust again. I put the folder back into Cartwright’s bag and leaned it against my stool, and then I had another drink, and I was halfway to the next bar – the usual one, where I was going to meet Hugh to arrange Cartwright’s funeral – before I realized that I’d left the bag behind me. It was night now, still raining, and the wind picked at my collar and slid fingers upmysleeves. I stood for a while on the corner, watching the cars wash past, and then I turned and limped back and  found the bag where I’d left it, at the corner of the bar. The place was quite crowded now, so I stayed for another drink.

I could just as easily leave Cartwright out of this. He never went anywhere, the twisted old fucker. He never knew any of the others. But he’s forced his way into it, dust reassembling itself. Beatrice stared at me, and I took her picture. It seems I can’t escape that. And then there’s the joke, which I’ll have to learn to savour: years after I stopped caring, after I gave up all the play-acting, I find that someone else was watching all along.

"Fantastic writing, great subject; a voice that is both passionate and cold. The most exciting first novel I have read in many years."
- Anne Enright

"A fine, darkly authoritative novel"
- Joseph O'Neill

"A remarkable first novel: edgy, angry and utterly individual."
- Christopher Hope

"Brilliantly transports the reader to Africa through the eyes of a war correspondent...this novel oozes authenticity and is gripping: I finished it in one sitting."
- Emma Giacon, Amazon

Brendan Barrington, editor at Penguin Ireland has only the words Not Untrue and Not Unkind for Ed O'Loughlin's Booker Longlisted novel.

“Ed O’Loughlin is a native of Canada, was raised and educated mostly in Ireland, worked in South Africa and was employed for a number of years by an Australian newspaper group. This history caused me to start thinking of him, while preparing to publish his first novel Not Untrue and Not Unkind, as the perfect Penguin author – a writer with meaningful links to four of the company’s best-established outposts. Sure enough, when the novel was published, a gratifying proportion of the initial sale (an unusually healthy sale for a first-time novelist) was accounted for by Canada, South Africa and Australia – not to mention Ireland, which is usually pretty good at supporting its new novelists. When the novel was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize – edging out not only books by Irish stalwarts Colum McCann and John Banville, but also the offerings of Margaret Atwood and the rest of the Canadian entry for the year – a debate started in the Canadian press: What is a Canadian novelist? Is Ed O’Loughlin one?

More importantly, Ed’s personal history informed the novel itself – though here we enter murky territory. The obvious connections between elements of Ed’s CV and the experiences of Not Untrue and Not Unkind’s protagonist, Owen Simmons, caused some journalists (always more excited by the fiction produced by their colleagues) to wonder if the novel was ‘all true’. I once found myself on the phone with one of these journalists, and I told her – with complete honesty – that I had no idea what was based on real events and what invented. Like Owen, Ed is Irish and worked as a journalist in Africa. Beyond that – and this is one of the glories of the novel – it is impossible to guess; and when you actually read the novel (which I suspect that journalist had not), the question does not really arise. If you can pull yourself away from the spell the story weaves long enough to think about it, you might find yourself concluding that only someone who had been in the places described, and had experiences akin to the events narrated, could possibly have written these sentences, these paragraphs – and so I’m sure it must be, in certain passages. But in its structure, its tone and its storytelling, Not Untrue and Not Unkind is every inch a novel. Its truthfulness comes not from any adherence to ‘facts’ but from a much deeper kind of engagement. I am certain that if Ed were ever to walk me through the novel, explaining which scenes were based on his own experience and which wholly imagined, I’d be very surprised.”

- Brendan Barrington, Senior Editor, Penguin Ireland