Nobody Move, This Is A Review: TOPLOADER by Ed O’Loughlin

In taking the so-called ‘war on terror’ to its illogical conclusion, Ed O’Loughlin has written a very funny satire on war and its makers. Set in and around the ‘Embargoed Zone’, a walled-off territory in which an entire population is branded as terrorist, the story incorporates many elements familiar to anyone who is au fait with modern warfare and its reporting: embedded journalists, remote-control murder, realpolitik espionage, and a hapless people demonised, brutalised and pounded to despair.
  Had O’Loughlin played his strokes with a straight bat, as he did in his debut novel, NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND, which was long-listed for the Booker Prize, then it’s likely the novel would have been a powerful and worthy novelisation of contemporary conflicts from around the globe. By setting the story in the near future, however, and giving it a blackly comic tone, O’Loughlin offers a hellish vision that combines a dystopian fatalism with a ghastly surrealism.
  The result is comedy with dum-dum crosses carved into its punchlines, so that the horror explodes whenever O’Loughlin targets a new victim. Chief among these is Flint Driscoll, a blogger-journalist who blithely broadcasts his prejudiced opinions on the terrorists of the Embargoed Zone without ever planting his army-issue boots on the ground. Driscoll is aided and abetted by the conniving Captain Smith, his lackey Daddy Jesus, and their inept superior, Colonel White. Grotesques to a man, none of the characters would be out of place in CATCH 22 or DR STRANGELOVE as they set about manipulating the political situation for the sake of their personal advancement.
  While the novel is laugh-out-loud funny, however, it’s in exploring the lives of the oppressed inhabitants of the Embargoed Zone that O’Loughlin lifts his novel out of the realms of audacious farce, by investing the story with poignant and profound truths about the human condition. By contrast with Flint Driscoll, O’Loughlin has had his boots on the ground in a similar situation, when he served as Middle-East correspondent for Australia’s ‘The Age’ newspaper. Thus we get heartbreaking detail amid the headline-grabbing scenes of carnage caused by the latest rocket-firing drone, when “dozens of kites wavered red and white and gold in the last rays of sunshine, each the focus of a child’s tethered dream.”
  Meanwhile, the daily, grinding struggle for life’s basic requirements experienced by Joseph, the teenage Flora and all the other inhabitants of the Zone is compared by O’Loughlin in one memorable analogy as that of bulls in a bullring, as Flora explains to a soldier who has found himself lost behind enemy lines:

  ‘There’s a lot of money in bullfighting …There’s power, too. That’s why the Roman emperors spent all their money on circuses …’
  ‘That’s the most cynical thing I’ve ever heard.’
  ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  Cynical, funny, harrowing and revelatory, TOPLOADER is one of the most inventive Irish novels of recent times. - Declan Burke

  This review first appeared in the Sunday Business Post.

  While we’re on the topic of TOPLOADER, one of its protagonists, blogger-cum-journalist Dr Flint Driscoll (right), offers his insights into contemporary international events via his website, blowback.net. Here, for example, is Dr Flint on the assassination - alleged - of Osama Bin Laden:

“So that’s it then. We finally got the Big O. Victory is at hand. It’s time to bring the boys and girls back home from Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo and Germany. President Barack Hussein Osama finally gets Uncle Sam some genuine pay-back for 9/11, and we can close this long and painful chapter in America’s gilded history.
  “Wrong, people. Wrong.
  “I have yet to see any convincing proof that whoever they – and we don’t know who “they” really are – killed in Pakistan last night was really Osama Bin Laden. We don’t even know that a raid took place. Sure, they can show us some grainy photos of a crashed helicopter, but what does that prove? Mysterious black helicopters crash all the time in the woods near my house in Virginia. The difference is that this time the UN aren’t covering it up.
  “These are ruthless, Godless, cunning people, who will stop at nothing to cling to their dream of global jihadi liberal domination. If you can fake a long-form Hawaii birth certificate, which uses a funny type of half-laminate paper, and has a Jack Lord watermark embedded against the grain, then this sort of thing is child’s play. Wise up, my friends: remember, these are the same people who faked two entire baseball World Series in 1992 and 1993, so the Toronto Blue Jays could appear to win. As if.
  “So what really happened in Abbottabad last night? Well, I’ve been working the blogosphere all night, and I’ve come up with a pretty solid picture of the real turn of events. According to security sources whom I can’t name here, for technical reasons, the principle target of the “raid” was an Osama Bin Laden lookalike, who has been kept “on ice” by the national Democratic leadership and its Pakistani/Al Qaeda allies since shortly before the 2001 terror atrocities. With President Osama’s re-election campaign only eighteen months away, the time was ripe to cash in on this particular chip. Cue ticker-tape and hoopla. Hail to the Chief.
  “So where is the real Osama Bin Laden, you ask me? Where he’s always been. Alive and well and living in Paris, like Khomeini before him, ready to go active again whenever the anti-American global elite needs him. A guy like that is far to useful to kill for real.” - Dr Flint Driscoll

  For more in the same vein, clickety-click here …

Once More, From The Top Loader

Ed O’Loughlin came storming out of the gates a couple of years back with NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND, which garnered a 2009 Booker Prize longlist nomination, not bad going at all for a debut novel. His forthcoming tome, TOP LOADER, sounds a right rip-snorter, and is described in the jacket copy as ‘A darkly comic masterpiece in the tradition of M*A*S*H, CATCH-22 and SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5’. Crikey. Quoth the blurb elves:

Spying inside the Embargoed Zone is an expensive business, not to say risky, and Agent Cobra wants his wages in full. But his down-at-heel spymaster can only offer payment in kind - and the first thing he finds in an unattended storeroom. And so both men are sucked into the mysterious Toploader project, a race to retrieve a deadly secret from inside the world’s first - and best - walled-off terrorist entity. Also caught in the crossfire are a resourceful teenage girl, a gung-ho reporter, a hapless drone-pilot and at least one very unfortunate donkey. Toploader is about to make their lives a lot more dangerous, and an awful lot more bizarre …

  NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND was given something of an edge given that former journalist O’Loughlin reported from Africa for the Irish Times for some years. He also worked as the Middle East correspondent for Melbourne’s The Age, which suggests that that yon ‘Embargoed Zone’, aka ‘the world’s first - and best - walled-off terrorist entity’, may or may not be based on the Gaza Strip.
  Either way, if NOT UNTRUE is any guide, O’Loughlin can write the hell out of a book, and ‘a darkly comic’ tale set in the Middle East sounds like a hell of a prospect. I’ll keep you posted as to how it goes …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND by Ed O’Loughlin

To mark Ed O’Loughlin’s terrific achievement in being long-listed for the Booker Prize with his debut novel, NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND, here’s purple prose-tinged excerpt from yours truly’s review from earlier this year:

‘Has anyone seen the other half of this baby?’ he asked. ‘We mustn’t count it twice.’
  It’s a moment to make even the most hardened reader of gory novels wince, but O’Loughlin is not in the business of sensationalism. Simmons bears witness to what seems at times a daily litany of tragedy, but does so in a clipped, understated fashion. The novel has been compared with the works of V.S. Naipaul and Graham Greene, but there’s a measure of Ernest Hemingway here too. The prose is muscular and delicate, the mark of a writer who knows his own strength and is sure of his aim. In the chaos of a jungle fire-fight, ambushed by the latest in an interminable series of half-naked rebel forces, Simmons observes a jeep make “a slow and sedate turn towards us, part-sheltered by the hulk of the armoured car … its indicator piously winking.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here.
  For a Q&A with the man, clickety-click here.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Ed O’Loughlin

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
THE BIG SLEEP by Raymond Chandler.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Mr Kurtz.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Viz comics.

Most satisfying writing moment?
The joke which only you get, and which you subsequently, regretfully, cut out of the final draft.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
DRACULA by Bram Stoker.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
THE THIRD POLICEMAN by Flann O’Brien.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Don’t know yet – I’m still new.

The pitch for your next book is …?
The desperate race to retrieve a weapons-grade washing machine from inside a near-future dystopia.

Who are you reading right now?
Anne Enright.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write – if God appears to you, you’re a prophet, and prophets make top dollar in the self-help market.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Online discounts available.

Ed O’Loughlin’s debut novel is NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND by Ed O’Loughlin

When his newspaper editor dies, a photograph in one of the man’s personal folders sets Owen Simmons, the Dublin-based narrator of NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND, reminiscing about his time as a correspondent in Africa, when he reported from South Africa, Zaire and Sierra Leone, among other hot-spots. One of a loose grouping of correspondents and photographers who roamed the continent in pursuit of the latest war, atrocity or military coup, Simmons has the detached tone and sharp eye for detail of a good journalist, even when writing about Beatrice, the photographer he falls for with despite his professional and personal cynicism.
  Ed O’Loughlin reported on Africa for eight years as a correspondent for ‘The Irish Times’, and here his debut fiction rings with a rare authenticity. As they pick their way through a rat-infested refugee camp massacre in search of ‘colour’ for their feature stories, for example, one of the journalists calls out to his colleagues. “‘Has anyone seen the other half of this baby?’ he asked. ‘We mustn’t count it twice.’”
  It’s a moment to make even the most hardened reader of gory novels wince, but O’Loughlin is not in the business of sensationalism. Simmons bears witness to what seems at times a daily litany of tragedy, but does so in a clipped, understated fashion. The novel has been compared with the works of V.S. Naipaul and Graham Greene, but there’s a measure of Ernest Hemingway here too. The prose is muscular and delicate, the mark of a writer who knows his own strength and is sure of his aim. In the chaos of a jungle fire-fight, ambushed by the latest in an interminable series of half-naked rebel forces, Simmons observes a jeep make “a slow and sedate turn towards us, part-sheltered by the hulk of the armoured car … its indicator piously winking.” Later, at a conference in Durban, he observes: “By the time I’d finished reading, the tide in the foyer had receded, stranding little pools of gossipers and the odd scuttling newcomer.”
  O’Loughlin, who has also reported on the Middle East, might have been expected to write a political treatise disguised as a novel. But while there is at one point a brilliantly sustained piece of ice-cold vitriol directed at the professional charity operatives, who “spend years dodging from one short-term contract to the next, chasing the funds as compassion flits from disaster to disaster”, the novel is almost perversely blinkered in the way it follows the fortunes of its characters without ever stepping back from the fray to make grand statements about the whys and wherefores of the conditions and situations they find themselves in. The journalists are there to dispassionately observe and report back to the outside world, and Simmons mimics their apparently callous tones as he records for the reader their words and deeds, very few of which derive from philanthropic or ideological motives.
  In another writer’s hands, the tale of last-minute evacuations, jungle ambushes, flights into and out of cities on the brink of fall or liberation, and discreet but passionate affairs, would have resulted in a full-tilt sprint delivered in breathless prose. Instead, NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND offers a meandering and at times deliberately obtuse narrative, one that shuffles and weaves, moving to an odd but quickly addictive rhythm. So much so, in fact, that it’s tempting to believe that O’Loughlin has composed the story in a style that conjures up outsiders’ perceptions of, and prejudices about, Africa. Certainly, having referenced the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, in which Muhammad Ali outfoxed George Foreman in Kinshasa by spreading himself on the ropes and absorbing inhuman levels of punishment before landing a killer blow, O’Loughlin provides a final twist that reveals his tale, and Simmons’ cynical posturing, to be a literary version of Ali’s legendary ‘rope-a-dope’ trick.
  Laced with the blackest of humour, studded with glints of hard-edged poetry, and underpinned by a poisonously cynical mindset that is as repulsive as it is compelling, NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND is one of the most powerful debut Irish novels of the last decade.

This review first appeared in the Sunday Business Post