The Weekenders

At present, Sudan suffers from a horrendous civil war: 1.4 million people have died here, while many more have been displaced. The Weekenders is a collection of fiction and non-fiction that takes an impressive array of British writers into the heart of Sudan's conflict, shedding light on this frequently ignored tragedy (profits from the book are going to help the relief effort).

Here is a mysterious tale from Alex Garland, WF Deedes' debut piece of fiction, and--the centrepiece of the collection--a disturbing novella by Irvine Welsh in which Welsh's trademark skewering of the vileness of human urges is counterbalanced by his fluid prose and the story's troubling setting. Paradoxically, however, the shortest piece of fiction--Andrew O'Hagan's Fish River--is also the most impressive, as O'Hagan succeeds with brilliance and grace in conveying the thought patterns of a Sudanese child whose mother has been raped and enslaved.

But although the setting is grim, the horror underscoring the collection is leavened by perhaps the funniest thing that Tony Hawks has written, as he recounts his doomed attempts to compose music in a war-ravaged town, and--more seriously--the moral dilemmas which arise when rich Europeans descend upon war-torn Africa. These problems are fleshed out more fully by Victoria Glendinning in the final piece, as she considers the ethics of NGOs and big business working in Sudan.

This is an illuminating and thought-provoking book which raises disturbing questions for us all. In an alarmingly prescient fiction on the American bombing of Khartoum in 1998 in their first search for Osama bin Laden, Giles Foden describes the response of the CIA operative in the region:

"Everything was screwed up. Sometimes it blew [his] head what a tangled world it was that he existed in."

View other editions of The Weekenders.
View books by Alex Garland, W.F. Deedes, Tony Hawks, Irvine Welsh, Victoria Glendinning, Andrew O'Hagan, Giles Foden.

Heart of Darkness... - Rated
Winner of the WH Smith "Travel Book of the Year" Award, this collection of four short stories, two essays, and a novella, explores the plight of contemporary Sudan. Under the auspices of The Daily Telegraph, seven well known writers were sent to southern Sudan to witness the ravages of the long-running civil war, which has claimed around a million and a half lives over the last fifteen years. The two main points readers will take away is a sense of the inexorable schism between the Muslim north and the non-Muslim south, and the exacerbating effect of international oil company operations in the south.

Each of the four short stories reflects the individual author's style: Alex (The Beach, The Tesseract) Garland's "R.S.S." is a creepy story of two boys, the well-known newspaperman W. F. Deedes' debut piece of fiction is old-fashioned, Giles (The Last King of Scotland, Ladysmith) Foden's "Weekenders" is a politically aware drama of aid workers, and Andrew O'Hagan's "Fish River" is an unsettling first-person depiction of the real-life slavers that operate in Sudan. That said, they are a bit thematically repetitive. On their own, each might have shone a bit brighter, but since the writers all went to the same area for a very brief visit, they're all drawing on the same brief impressions for inspiration.

The two nonfiction pieces are biographer/novelist's Victoria Glendinning's surprisingly thoughtful critique of humanitarian NGO operations in southern Sudan, and humorist Tony (Round Ireland With A Fridge, Playing the Moldovans at Tennis) Hawk's bumbling attempt to write a song with some locals. Glendinning's is a worthy antidote to knee-jerk charity responses to conflict, and Hawk's is a hilarious welcome respite from the grimness of the rest of the book. By far the longest piece is Irvine (Trainspotting, Filth, et al) Welsh's 140+ page novella "Contamination." It's similar to much of his work in that the story delves deep into the dark side of human nature, however his vivd imagination and language are largely absent. Instead, there's a very straightforward account of the struggle between two warring tribes to control a village, and the horrors that struggle brings to wide swath of innocents. It's not bad, it's just not the Welsh you might expect. Altogether, the book offers little in the way of hope for the future, and no prescriptions for change, but it is a worthy attempt to bring the general public's attention to an ugly civil war.

Interesting idea - but where are the Sudanese authors? - Rated
The Daily Telegraph organised a short trip for several British writers to war-ravaged areas of south Sudan. The results are mixed, ranging from a naive and irritatingly jocular piece by Tony Hawks, to some dark and moving short stories.

By far the best contribution is a short novel by Irving Welsh. In a preface, Welsh warns that he was only in south Sudan for a short time - but it is easy to be convinced that his characters, their conflicts and the attrocities he portrays are drawn from the real experiences of those he met.

The authors are quick to condemn the oil companies who have made a bad situation in south Sudan worse, but there is little in this book to challenge western preconceptions about the country and its people. Questions over the role of humanitarian organisations - and whether they are prolonging the conflict - are confined to a short (but thoughtful) article by Victoria Glendinning. There is no discussion of possible solutions to the war, and no sense of hope for the future.

The Daily Telegraph should be commended for undertaking this project and drawing attention to the plight of south Sudan, but I would have prefered to hear from some Sudanese writers themselves.