Journalism: the novel approach


Journalistic fiction tells us more than just a story. Conrad Landin reports


W That is all.”


Almost a century and a half later, reporters still bristle at the mention of ‘journalese’ while most novelists look despairingly at their sales figures. Now – as then – the divide is often bridged, whether by journalists dipping their toes into the world of fiction or novelists deploying their literary skills in the service of a reporting assignment. Many writers relish the freedom that fiction offers in


comparison to the journalistic requirement to stick to the facts. But there is a strong tradition, too, of journalistic fiction which not only holds up a mirror to its time, but also relies on the tools of the reporting trade. The literary world seems increasingly obsessed with


‘autofiction’ — stories strongly based on one’s own experiences — which has brought us some of the most powerful writing of the past decade. However, reported novels offer us an insight into not just the individual mind but also society at large. Over more than three decades at the London Review of


Books, Andrew O’Hagan has become famed for his long-form journalism on subjects from Grenfell Tower to Julian Assange. He has written seven novels since 1999 too. But his latest, Caledonian Road (Faber, £20), is of a different breed. Ostensibly the story of the downfall of a public intellectual called Campbell Flynn, this doorstopper tome features more than 40 characters across the social spectrum of contemporary Britain. And at its heart is London’s King’s Cross district — which is, incidentally, home to the NUJ’s Headland House. “A lot of my reportage over the years for the London Review and elsewhere has gone into this book,” O’Hagan says over a drink at the Steps Bar in his native Glasgow. “Cryptocurrency is a world I got to know very well. The world of street gangs,


20 | theJournalist


hat is the difference,” asks Ernest in Oscar Wilde’s The Critic As Artist, “between literature and journalism?” His interlocutor Gilbert does not hesitate: “Oh! Journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.


knife crime and the garment workers in Leicester — I went to Leicester and researched that. You can almost fact check parts of the book – in that way, that had kind of drawn on journalistic research.” It’s something equally apparent in Jilly Cooper’s latest instalment of the Rutshire Chronicles, Tackle! (Penguin, £9.99). With a similar number of characters to Caledonian Road (and both, like the best investigative features, come with a cast list to help us out), her plot centres on her returning hero Rupert Campbell-Black’s purchase of a local football club, Searston Rovers. The political and romantic escapades that follow take place


entirely within the world of football – but NUJ member Cooper is a self-described “football ignoramus who still can’t


Bat ears and vanity


READING up on your subject matter is an essential part of an author’s research. But is desk-based study sufficient? Many powerful portrayals


of contemporary society have come from writers with great powers of observation. Patrick Hamilton’s


depiction of British blackshirts in his 1940 novel Hangover Square was so on point that his friends in the Communist Party believed he had to be a closeted fascist. Journalist Claud Cockburn credited this to Hamilton’s “bat-winged ear”, which would pick up patterns of speech and behaviour in pubs.


For O’Hagan, personal


observation is essential. “My own life and career [have] led me into that world of oligarchs, minor royals,” he says. “Those dukes, I got to examine them with a sort of microscope before I’d written a line. You’d think they’d run away from a person like me or you, but they don’t. The combination of vanity and narcissism and self-certainty


makes those people think their lives are less absurd, less corrupt than they are.” Novelist Beryl Bainbridge


combined news stories with situations in her life, with the result that “the whole thing seems weird”. Her first novel, Harriet Said, was completed in 1958 after she read about Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme, two teenagers who murdered Parker’s mother to avoid being separated across continents. The story so appalled editors that it was not published until 1972. Jenny Diski, whose novels


draw extensively on her life, faced a stumbling block when researching her second book, Rainforest: she is terrified of spiders. Rather than travel to the tropics, she settled for a day at Kew Gardens.


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