Many Rivers to Cross By Dylan Moore. Published by Three Impostors (www.threeimpostors.co.uk)
“Each of us has a story,” the refugee is told. “The important thing is how we tell it, whether we stick to the truth.”
The statement – or is it a warning? – comes from an immigration officer on the Italian island of Lampedusa, just after the Ethiopian has been rescued from a deflating boat sent into the Mediterranean from Libya by people traffickers.
We’re well into Dylan Moore’s debut novel by then. The story starts with the apparent disappearance of a refugee below Newport’s Transporter Bridge, but this is part of a wider brief for the writer.
If journalism and the mainstream media often conform to the traditional and simple rules – asylum seekers are refugees fleeing persecution while illegal immigrants are seeking economic advantage – Moore wonders whether creative writing can be used to explore not just the what, when, where and who of stories, but the why?
So he goes “upstream”, tracing the stories of refugees back to Addis Ababa. But he also explores attitudes closer to home about immigration, nationality, culture and identity.
Newspaper editor David, aware of the routine and limitations of day-by-day, hour-by-hour journalism, is awakened from his routine by the Transporter Bridge incident. He decides to go deeper into the story and eventually finds himself in the dust – literally – of Addis Ababa.
Mike, his old school mate and trans-continental lorry driver who goes armed with an iron bar to deter refugees, tempers his anti-immigration rhetoric when David’s around, because David’s wife is black. Then David brings the Ethiopian care worker Solomon to quiz night at the pub. Have he and Mike met before?
Then there’s Aman, an asylum seeker, Selam, a single mother, and the sex worker Jasmine.
Moore handles their inter-linked stories superbly, strikingly succeeding in expressing different voices for each of the characters.
Moore himself acknowledges the difference in approach between someone like the Vietnamese-American author Viet Nguyen who is a refugee writer and himself as a “writer of refugees”.
Moore has worked with refugees in Newport and clearly has listened closely to their stories. He has a good, sympathetic ear and never slips into sentimentality.
He set himself the challenge of telling diverse stories and expressing various points of view in a number of voices in one book. This could have turned into a cacophony, a discord. Instead Moore has triumphed with the form, and it has served a multi-layered story with dignity and some passion.
Whether he has told the stories by “sticking to the truth” we can’t know. But these are people you will care about and whose voices you hear because of Moore’s work.
