(This is the end note in my newly published book, No Good Deed and it is my attempt to engage with a sometimes fraught debate about what writers should write.)
Every book is a labour of love (Lord knows most of us are not in it for the money!) but this one has a special place in my heart. I started writing it just before lockdown began here in the UK in 2020. It was a fearful, terrifying time when everything we thought we knew was turned on its head. Our two teenage daughters were stuck at home, along with my journalist husband. Suddenly, all the things that used to feed our souls and enrich our lives were dangerous — the very air we breathed was potentially toxic. So I buried myself in my writing but, as any author will tell you, writing a novel is in no way a soothing pastime. And I was more nervous than usual, even before Covid upended our lives. I had published three novels previously but my publisher seemed underwhelmed by my ideas for a fourth. I made a few false starts — an idea would surface, I’d be fired with enthusiasm and I’d bang out 10,000 words. But then I would be overcome by doubts and I would grind to a soul-crushing halt.
Until I began to hear Aristide talking in my head, and then the story came alive.
I had travelled to Central African Republic in 2016 to write stories for The Guardian and I was deeply moved by the children and teenagers I met. Some had been child soldiers, some were students, all had experienced more of life’s sorrows than most of us will, thankfully, ever know as they were swept up in a sectarian conflict – known as bira in the Sango language – that broadly pitted Muslims against Christians and animists, but which was really about economic and political exclusion after decades of misgovernance and instability.
The memory of one 12-year-old girl haunted me: as she told me how she was raped by a rebel fighter in Bossangoa when she was just 10, her little feet swung back and forth. She was sitting on a wooden bench and was too small to reach the floor. She was the same age as my eldest daughter at the time.
In that same school building, I also interviewed boys who had joined militias to protect their villages from rebels, or to take revenge for the deaths of family members. Boys like Aristide. Many of his experiences are based on the interviews I did in that school.
One 16-year-old boy told me: “We didn’t use weapons, we just had pieces of wood. We went with the older ones onto the battlefield and when someone was shot and dying, we would go and finish him off, and get the weapon.”
What I learned during that trip, and through the research I did afterwards, informed the story I have told within these pages.
Like Elodie, I did hear a gunfight outside my hotel on the day I arrived in Bangui. It was not nearly as dramatic, although I have experienced other gunfights when I lived and worked in Ivory Coast during its civil war and when I covered the war in Liberia in the early 2000s. Like Elodie, I got caught in the most torrential of downpours while trying to find my car and driver after an interview.
While in Bangui, I visited the camp at M’Poko airport where about 20,000 displaced people were living in shelters made from corrugated iron, tarpaulins or wood.
I tried to recreate what I saw and heard to be true to the place and the context. And then I let my characters tell their stories.
I realise there is a vigorous and entirely justified debate in publishing about the need for diversity and authentic voices. I couldn’t agree more. We do need more storytellers from all corners of the world, we need more stories, we need to hear more voices, all the voices. This has long been my passion: it was because I wanted to hear those other stories that I left Ireland and became a journalist all those years ago.
But I do not believe it is a zero sum game, and I will always defend a fiction writer’s right to let their imagination roam free, spanning continents, experiences and lives, opening doors and smashing down the barriers that seek to diminish our shared humanity by emphasising what separates us, rather than what unites us.
Fiction is one of the most powerful antidotes to the othering that characterises so much of our modern discourse. Fiction combats that noxious impulse by taking us into other lives, by drawing us into other stories, by expanding the horizons of our worlds beyond our mere lived experience.
I fear that in our justified determination to promote diversity, we may have inadvertently placed new limits on the imagination. Surely, that cannot be right. Of course, authors have a duty to treat their subject matter with care, to eschew ill-informed stereotypes, to avoid the trite and the banal, to research the setting and the context of the story, as well as the background and experiences of the characters. But you must do that anyway if you hope to be truthful to your story. It is the only non-negotiable.
Because the story you tell is the one that only you can tell. It does not purport to be The Story about anything. It is just A Story and as such it must be truthful: truthful to your vision, the characters and the setting as they are in your imagination. Fiction enables us to rise above the simplistic notion that the only truth we can know or understand is the truth of our own lives, where we live, the colour of our skin, the jobs we have, the people we love. What an impoverished imaginative existence that implies. What a bleak and reductive outlook on the world. I like to think humanity has a shared truth and it cannot be found on the surface of life but exists on a deeper, more profound level, in the place where the personal becomes the universal because our essential humanity is universal.
If you enjoyed No Good Deed perhaps you would like to check out one of my other novels: Fractured, Rain Falls on Everyone and The Reckoning.