Ed O’Loughlin was born in Toronto and raised in Ireland. He reported from Africa for the Irish Times, and was Middle East correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age of Melbourne. His first novel, Not Untrue & Not Unkind was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2009.
Toploader is Ed O’Loughlin’s first novel for Quercus. It is a satire set in a fictional “Embargoed Zone” where Captain Smith and Agent Cobra 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.
Caroline Butler: How did you come to write Toploader? Why did you want to tell that particular story?
Ed O’Loughlin: The story was suggested to me by the numerous murky and unfashionable wars I covered while I was a newspaper reporter in Africa and the middle east. I gradually became aware that most if not all non-total warfare involves a great deal of symbiosis between the supposedly warring leaderships: violence, or “security”, is their mutual meal-ticket, and they need each other to maintain their status and power and wealth within their respective societies. So I created a “war in a bottle”, to caricature this reality.
Caroline Butler: There are some great dark comic moments in the book. Without giving too much away, can you explain the significance of the donkey?
Ed O’Loughlin: Attempts actually have been made in real life to use explosives-laden donkeys in bomb attacks, with predictably poor results. But I decided to blow up a donkey on page three of the novel, and to lovingly describe the gory aftermath, as a kind of public service warning to prospective readers: if you are looking for a tasteful, wry, worthy and wholesome helping of landfill lit. fic. then you can stop reading now.
Caroline Butler: Your first novel was set in a specific time and place whereas Toploader is “some time in the future”, what made you decide to take that approach this time around?
Ed O’Loughlin: Setting a book or film or whatever in a near-future dystopia is by now a mainstream device. Future narratives allow you to examine the present from a different perspective – a bit like a painter stepping sideways to get a fresh angle of the subject. You aren’t trying to predict the future, you are asking what might happen if observable contemporary problems and trends are drawn out in time. It’s a form of social caricature. Toploader was inspired in large part by the Gaza Strip, which is a real-life present day sci-fi dystopia, a mash-up of Bladerunner’s Los Angeles. and the Terminator, and Escape from New York, and the Bexhill refugee camp in Children of Men (which I’m sure was modeled on footage from the middle east). In the middle east and Pakistan and elsewhere there already are eyes in the sky and killer robots flying around overhead, looking for targets. Toploader’s Embargoed Zone has a strong resemblance to Gaza, but shorn of national or religious labels, which I find irrelevant, and extrapolated forward in time.
Caroline Butler: What was the most difficult aspect of writing Toploader?
Ed O’Loughlin: I had to work out a very intricate plot, up front, before I started the actual writing, and I hadn’t done that before. But once the plot and characters clicked into place it was actually a very easy and fun book to write: the narrative is very stark, deliberately stripped of anything that would slow down or obstruct the movement of the plot, which is what the book is all about. Because of that, I didn’t have to agonize over pretty prose or striking descriptions: just do the bare minimum to move the story on.
Caroline Butler: How did you first manage to get published?
Ed O’Loughlin: I had no agent and no contacts of any sort in the literary world, so after I’d finished the first draft of my first novel, Not Untrue and Not Unkind, I sent unsolicited samples to about fifteen or sixteen publishers and agents in London and Dublin. Most rejected it outright, some never answered at all. One, Penguin Ireland, liked it and, after some further work, accepted it.
Caroline Butler: You were a war correspondent and journalist for many years, how does that training affect your novel writing?
Ed O’Loughlin: My journalistic experiences are central to both Not Untrue and Not Unkind and to Toploader but I think I’ll probably move away from that in my future novels. I’m not sure that news writing has much cross-over relevance for literary work, in the way that, say, long-form magazine writing might. I did learn to touch-type and punctuate, I suppose. But writing as a news reporter, under massive pressure of time, and limited by the facts and opinions you are able to gather in a hurry and then stand over, is a very different experience – much more stressful, and less personal. I can’t say I miss it.
Caroline Butler: What do you think of blogging and twitter “news”? Do you think newspapers are dead / dying?
Ed O’Loughlin: One of the fictional characters in Toploader is a right-wing militarist blogger called Flint Driscoll – strangely, his real-life blog has now appeared at www.blow-back.net, the url I invented for him in the novel.
I wrote the Driscoll character as a punch bag on which to humorously vent my personal and professional disregard for news bloggers as a class. Covering the middle east, my colleagues and I were amazed at how often bloggers in the US and Israel and elsewhere, who had never even visited the places we were writing about, felt qualified to factually contradict our first-hand reporting. Sometimes, they were able to influence the story more than we could, hijacking the news.
Yet most of the factual news material I see on blogs, and on twitter, is derived second hand from the “old media”. Blogs can and do contribute a great deal by offering well-informed analysis and opinion, and as forums for debate and for citizen journalism, but their material is still firmly anchored by the work of a dwindling number of paid journalists – professional witnesses. The news industry is in crisis because a lot of people haven’t twigged this yet, and think that society can rely on the new media and dispense with old-fashioned news gathering, which has to be paid for, because it costs a lot to do. I think some professional news-gathering will continue into the future, but it might be limited to very local operations, to niche interests and to a few elite brands, like the BBC, Guardian and NY Times. And even they are going to have to find some way to get users to contribute to the cost of their operations. Maybe they’ll end up appealing for donations, like NPR or WFMU in New Jersey. Personally, I now consume most of my news for free, online, from old media sources. But if they actually asked me for money, I’d be happy to give them some, because I want them to survive.
Caroline Butler: Are you optimistic about the future of books and reading?
Ed O’Loughlin: Yes. Reading, whether fiction or non-fiction, by book or e-reader, is a uniquely immersive experience. Technological changes might actually work to its advantage.
Caroline Butler: What do you do when you are not writing?
Ed O’Loughlin: Mind the kids. Watch TV. Read. Exercise.
Caroline Butler: What are you currently reading?
Ed O’Loughlin: James Clark Ross’s Antarctic Voyages.
Caroline Butler: What is your favourite book? Favourite quote?
Ed O’Loughlin: I’m not sure I have a favourite book. It changes. Today, I’ll say Slaughterhouse Five. I’ll pick a quote from it, courtesy of the internet: “He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.”
Caroline Butler: Do you have any tips for the aspiring writer?
Ed O’Loughlin: Don’t try and over-think it when you’re starting out. Sit down and start writing things. You’ll be amazed at what comes out.
Read more: Toploader
Just had this fantastic review in from The Economist magazine, reviewing Elias Khoury’s As Though She Were Sleeping:
ELIAS KHOURY’S As Though She Were Sleeping follows Meelya, a young Lebanese woman, as she dreams her way into marriage with Mansour. It drifts between her home of Beirut and Nazareth, as Meelya remembers her childhood and imagines her future. Newly married she wanders the streets of Nazareth ceaselessly, “becoming a line in a large book that she read and lived at the same time.”
Meelya’s dreams, both by night and by day, are filled with memories of her uncle who hung himself from a bell rope and of salty days swimming with her brother.
Read more at The Economist
Read more: As Though She Were Sleeping
Huge congratulations to the lovely Karin Altenberg, author of the acclaimed Island of Wings, who has been nominated for the Newton First Book Award at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
