Justin Huggler talks about ISIS, Brexit, Hitler, fiction vs reportage

Tishani Doshi finds out from Justin Huggler how a journalist sees the world after turning into a novelist.

June 27, 2017 10:03 pm | Updated 10:24 pm IST

Reporter-turned-novelist Justin Huggler feels that fiction, paradoxically, forces you to be more truthful than news reporting. | Tishani Doshi

Reporter-turned-novelist Justin Huggler feels that fiction, paradoxically, forces you to be more truthful than news reporting. | Tishani Doshi

This is a blog post from

The Return Home is Justin Huggler’s second novel. Huggler grew up on the Channel Island of Jersey and has worked as foreign correspondent in Turkey, Israel, Afghanistan, Iraq, India and Prague for the Independent newspaper. He currently lives in a quiet town in Germany called Babelsberg, where he hopes to be able to get back to woodcarving.

 

 

At what point does a foreign correspondent decide that he wants to write novels? Could you talk about the difference between writing news and writing beyond those boundaries of reportage?

 

I always wanted to write novels but I didn't have the stories to tell. The turning point came when I started to find there were stories I could tell better through fiction than reportage.

I think a key difference is that, paradoxically, fiction forces you to be more truthful than news reporting. In order to make your characters believable you have to get their motivations right. You can’t hide behind assumptions the way the news does. In a novel it isn't enough to say someone is a terrorist or a patriot: the reader needs to know why. In reportage it’s often enough to write what you see: you go to a war or disaster zone and tell what you witness. But writing a novel forces you to look at things from another point of view, to see them with your characters’ eyes. And a novel allows you to explore the drama of daily life. Most people are more concerned with things that don’t make the news: family, love, friendship. There’s as much drama in the average family as there is in a war.

 

After having lived in chaotic places like Afghanistan, Iraq and India, among others, you now live in a quiet place called Babelsberg. What are the things you miss most about the places you used to live in? How do you negotiate place and pace?

 

I miss different things about different places. I miss the warmth of Indians. You stop for a chai and you start talking to the person next to you. Europeans don’t open up so readily. And I miss the way it was impossible to be bored in India. I remember sitting in a traffic jam in the summer heat, going crazy, and getting to the front and discovering the hold-up was because an elephant was ahead and it had stopped to eat the leaves off a tree.

Places like Afghanistan and Iraq are different. A lot of my time there was very frightening, but you miss the resilience of people, and the camaraderie, and the courage. I remember, in the Hindu Kush once, the jeep we were travelling in started to slip on a mountain track. There was a thousand-foot drop to the side. I was grateful when the driver suggested we get down to lessen the weight. But when he started up again, the wheels kept skidding and he was getting closer to the abyss. He started to panic. An Afghan I was travelling with got back in beside him. He put his life in the driver’s hands, just to steady his nerves, and talked him up the track. You can learn a lot from courage like that.

As for how I negotiate place and pace, I try to remember what I learnt from India, and let things come at their own pace. Cities are full of people in such a hurry they don’t see what’s all around them. They’re lost in smartphones and earphones, and they don’t even notice they’re walking in history. I’m grateful for the quiet of Babelsberg, its forests and lakes. You can sleep with the windows open, and the only sound is the trees moving in the wind.

 

You grew up in Jersey, the only part of the British Isles to have been occupied by the Nazis during WWII. Could you talk about how this legacy of war has affected you and whether you think it was the impetus for you to travel to war-torn countries?

 

When I wrote The Return Home , I wanted to set it in Jersey to contrast this quiet little island where nothing ever happened with places like Afghanistan, where one of the characters has been injured. But when I went back to Jersey to research the book, I realised just how littered my childhood had been with the legacy of war. I went out to this old German watchtower on the coast we used to play in as children, a huge concrete tower, about five storeys tall. It’s kept locked up now, but in those days we used to run up and down the stairs and play soldiers inside. And I realised I’d been playing in this war relic long before I ever thought of travelling to report on wars.

It went deeper. This character in my book, Uncle Jack, has lost his leg to a landmine in Afghanistan. I was looking for a place on Jersey to set the family home, and there was this spot I wanted to use because it’s called Egypt Wood, and I loved the name. It’s the most un-Egyptian–looking place you could imagine. I found out that there’s a memorial in Egypt Wood to a British soldier who was killed on a secret mission to Jersey during the war. He was killed by a landmine. He’d led a team of commandos over in the night to spy on the Nazis who were occupying the island, but he trod on a mine on his way through the wood. Here was I, writing about landmines, and I’d never even realised the island where I grew up had once been mined. Of course, after that I had to set the book in Egypt Wood. But I don’t think I was very conscious of this heritage growing up. I think Jersey influenced me more to go out and see the world because it was so tiny. I was the child who sat on the beach dreaming of the world beyond the sea.

 

On June 12, 2017, the U.S. celebrated 50 years of Loving Day — when the Supreme Court struck down all anti- miscegenation laws. You are married to an Indian woman (a fellow-Madrasi as it happens)… a broad question, but with a rise in far-right extremism in Germany and across Europe, how do you see the future shaping up in regard to race relations?

 

I’m very worried about where we’re heading in Europe at the moment. I grew up in a Europe that had put the far-right behind it, now it seems to be turning back that way. Everywhere people are talking about putting up walls and keeping the Other out, whether it’s foreigners or Muslims, immigrants or refugees.

I fell in love with my wife because of who she is, not where she’s from or the colour of her skin. I grew up in a Europe where we assumed we could marry whomever we wanted, but I’m aware what a privileged minority that makes us in human history. I hope our children will have the same possibilities. I was actually the product of a mixed marriage myself, albeit an “invisible” one since both my parents are white: my father is English and my mother is Irish. When I was growing up, at the height of the IRA campaign for a united Ireland, it could make life a little complicated at times. I was growing up on this British island, and some of the other kids were very anti-Irish. And I remember wondering how I was supposed to feel: was half of me supposed to feel one way and half the other? Was I supposed to be angry at myself? So, I think I was always aware of the absurdity of associating people with political ideas just because of where they were from.

I actually worry less about Germany than about other parts of Europe. The far-right has been back on the rise here, but only on the margins. There’s an in-built resistance to those ideas in Germany because they've seen where they can lead. I was talking to a German friend about this the other day, and he said you could never get a politician here saying “Make Germany great again”. Because Hitler already did that. He took that idea to its poisonous limits and made it somewhere no one ever wants to go again. They had a great billboard at Berlin airport recently. It was right outside the terminal, the first thing you saw when you arrived. And it just said: “Berlin. Done with walls.”

 

You mentioned that one of the things you like doing in Berlin is to walk the streets where the Wall used to be. Why? What does that ghost of a wall represent to you?

 

I think what I like about it is the triumph of its disappearance. There’s hardly a trace of it left, apart from a couple of small stretches they've preserved for historical reasons. The city has grown back over the divide and in places it can be hard to work out where the Wall ran. It’s even harder to believe it was ever there.

 

I was talking to a German friend about this the other day, and he said you could never get a politician here saying “Make Germany great again”. Because Hitler already did that. He took that idea to its poisonous limits and made it somewhere no one ever wants to go again.

The Wall was a failure. It was supposed to force people to live the way the East German government told them, to fence out the corrupting influence of the West. And now East Germany is gone: the “corrupting” ideas of democracy and freedom have simply swept it and its Wall away.

I interviewed a group of men who built a tunnel under the Wall so people could escape from the East. They’re all old men now, but they were just students then, kids in West Berlin who didn't like the Wall and decided to do something about it. They got 57 people out. And I interviewed a man who escaped by swimming across a canal. He had to hide underwater from the East German snipers and got attacked by a swan on the way. After he got out he started going back for his friends, smuggling them out in the boot of his car. I like the story of the Wall because it’s a tale of the triumph of the human spirit.

 

The past year has been a tumultuous year for British politics. What’s your view on the clear division in the British electorate that has been exposed with the Brexit vote?

 

It goes back to what we were talking about with the rise of the far-right and the desire to keep the Other out. A lot of the arguments put forward for Brexit were about keeping people out of the country. There’s this myth that immigrants are taking jobs away from people, and it’s simply not true. Britain has almost never had lower unemployment. But there’s this tendency to blame everything on the immigrants, and at times it gets uncomfortably close to the way anti-Semitism worked in 1930s Germany, and we all know how that ended.

A lot of the pro-Brexit stuff seemed to be about a desire to go back to the “good old days”, to a sort of idyllic 1950s Britain that never existed, but of course it always remains unspoken that the country was a lot whiter in those days.

The trouble is the debate has been argued in the wrong terms in Britain. The only thing that is talked about is the economy, as if that’s all the European Union is good for. There’s no discussion of the way the EU has brought 50 years of peace to the bloodiest and most war-torn continent in human history. And worst of all, the British are now setting themselves up against the EU. The “Brexiteers”, as they’re called, don’t just want to leave, they want the rest of the EU to fail, like spoiled children who can’t stand to see others enjoying what they have rejected.

 

 

Finally, as someone who has lived in the Middle-East and Europe, how do you see these tensions playing out in terms of increased terrorist attacks in European cities, disenfranchised youth, ISIS, and the conditions of people living in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan?

 

I think we’re getting into very dangerous territory with the way the terror attacks in Europe are increasingly portrayed in terms of Islam against the West. It’s being talked about as a clash of civilisations when it’s no such thing: it’s angry young men committing evil and wicked deeds in the name of God, just as they have throughout the centuries.

A clash of civilisations is the way ISIS sees it, and what troubles me is we’re beginning to speak their language. If you think of some one like Osama bin Laden, when he died six years ago he was a beaten man. But if he were to wake up in 2017, I think he’d be pretty happy: his cause is on the march again . We’re breathing life back into it by allowing ISIS and its followers to get away with the lie that they speak for Islam.

Angry youth have always taken up unworthy causes to win respect, or money, or attention from women. They used to go off to the jungle and become Maoists, today they become jihadis.

I fear the news media is playing a part in this. We rush to put their picture on the television, track down their relatives, tell their story. As long as we keep giving them the attention they want, they’ll keep killing to get it.

The Middle East has plenty of problems of its own making. But it’s no coincidence that the places exporting violence to the West are Iraq and Afghanistan, which the West invaded, and Syria, where civil war spread from the Iraq invasion. We made these messes, and sooner or later we’re going to have to clear them up. If the U.S. had spent a fraction of what it did on invading Iraq into building schools and hospitals for the people, who knows where we might be today?

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