Sometimes a book’s relevance to current events can feel a bit eerie. That’s been the case for me with The Enemy Within, the third thriller in the John Bailey series of standalones from Tim Ayliffe. Although he and I spoke in late June, it’s taken me a while to come back to write up the interview. Not because I didn’t enjoy speaking with him (he’s lovely), but because my poor lockdown-battered brain struggled to wrap itself around how offputtingly prescient so much of what he wrote and what we discussed became in the weeks after our conversation.
The Enemy Within follows journalist John Bailey writing a piece on white supremacy and far-right nationalism in Australia. Violence quickly blooms, and as Bailey searches for answers, he wrestles with questions about the role of media and interference with press freedoms.
With The Enemy Within, Ayliffe has tapped into something unsettlingly relevant. At the time of writing this article, the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban and the suicide bombing at Kabul on August 26 airport raised questions in public discussion about the resurgence of global jihadist movements. However, the reality is that the concern in countries such as Australia about the threat of Islamic extremism is far outweighed by the threat of white supremacy.
Given Ayliffe started writing the book in 2019 and finished drafting it in October 2020, his exploration into the dangers posed by far-right nationalism in Western countries feels prophetic. I ask whether he feels as much, given the January 6 Capitol Hill insurrection in America, or the reports of a group of Neo-Nazis in the Grampions on Australia Day (January 26). He speaks with a broad accent whose drawn out syllables give time for a composed and thoughtful answer.
“These are things that have been bubbling around my head for a few years,” he admits. “A lot of the far-right nationalism stuff, and a lot of the white supremacist research I’d done was around 2019,” he adds. However, he believes “this is the most realistic book I’ve written out of three in terms of the ideas that I explore.” To evidence this, he notes that a quote in the book from the Director-General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) in which he identified white supremacy as a key threat facing Australia, was directly taken from a 2018 speech.
This conversation took place before the anti-lockdown protests in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane on August 21—Melbourne police said they were the most violent for over 20 years—the organising groups of which are mired within white supremacist ideology, even if many of the attendees at such events (if you can call people flagrantly flouting public health and assaulting police officers and animals an event) do not believe themselves such.
Given various stories in August this year revealed that half of the Australian intelligence community’s important domestic counter-terrorism cases now involve neo-Nazi cells working through COVID-19 disinformation channels to increase recruitment, hoping to start a race war, it’s hard to not wonder what crystal ball Ayliffe was using when he wrote The Enemy Within.
However, Ayliffe does have a bit of an advantage: he’s been a journalist for the last 20 years and is the Managing Editor of Television and Video for ABC News. He was one of the people instrumental in establishing the ABC News Breakfast in 2008 (which I watch most mornings). The programs he oversees now include The Drum, ABC News Breakfast, and Planet America. With pride, he tells me that ABC News is “the one area where we’re actually growing an audience at the moment,” but he distributes that pride amongst the people with whom he works, as he attributes the channel and shows’ success to a “lovely team of people.”
Being in this particular position, then, Ayliffe has had insight into issues before they land on the radar of public awareness. But it’s through writing engaging fiction that he’s able to not only bring these issues to public awareness, but to unpack them, too. The humbleness reappears as he says “as a journalist, my job is to speak to people that are smarter than me. I believe in climate change, because 99.9% of climate scientists tell me it’s real. They’ve spent decades of their lives studying this stuff.”
So it’s no surprise that this humble, thoughtful attitude is reflected in how he views his writing. He quotes Philip Roth who said, ‘Updike and Bellow hold their flashlights out into the world, reveal the world as it is now. I dig a hole and shine my flashlight into the hole’, going on to explain, “I’m looking at the world, I think, as it is now. But I’m also really trying to go a bit go a bit deeper and look at, you know, some of those dark places we don’t we don’t like to look, but we know they’re there. And I think that’s one of the things that intrigues readers about crime fiction is, you get to have a look into the darkness, but you’re always given that glimmer of light.”
I ask about the space between being a journalist and being an author of fiction—if we could really call The Enemy Within wholly fiction. Perhaps a fictionalised narrative around very real issues, might be a better way to describe it—which I also add. He pauses. When he speaks, the broadness to his accent is emphasised as he slows down his words as he thinks the answer through. “Look, the best crime thrillers that I’ve read over the years, and the writers I most admire, they actually tell you, they explore something in the real world today, and they have a plot sitting in that world. So that’s what I’m doing,” he tells me.
As we back and forth about the limitations of a news story, as it has to briefly inform rather than take the time to break down the layers of complexity behind many stories, he observes, “this is the good thing about fiction, you get to get to dance with the truth, you know, you get to get really close with it, without having to worry about the kind of the sort of strict rules around nonfiction and reporting, […] you get to pose a lot of questions that you don’t get to pose in nonfiction.”
Certainly, it’s not uncommon for journalists to explore some of the stories they encounter in more depth in a fictionalised narrative—Katherine Firkin’s books are the example which spring to mind. When I ask about how directly what he experiences in his job as a journalist influences his writing, he answers simply and clearly; “my day job’s like research. I get to have conversations with people that ordinary people don’t, I get to find out things that everyday people don’t find out, some things that I shouldn’t know. So that’s the thing about being a journalist and having good contacts and being plugged into the backrooms our world.”
Ayliffe doesn’t pull his punches in speaking about those concerns arise from what he sees across his job. One of the other themes of The Enemy Within which intersects with the investigation into far-right nationalism is the overreach of authority, especially when it comes to censoring the media. Some readers may remember the controversy surrounding Australian Federal Police raids on journalist homes in 2019 and the ensuing discussion surrounding free press. Ayliffe draws my attention to the fact that in the course of the book, he quotes “directly from the warrant that was used to raid the ABC,” which “had the power to, to alter change, copy or delete our files in their investigation.”
The need to safeguard journalistic freedoms arises within a context of distrust toward traditional media. The issue is a complex one, arguably problematised by tabloid-style media. Although, when I raise this, Ayliffe surprises with the perspective that, “tabloid journalism can be very powerful, and it’s getting people to read stories in a more accessible way and getting people to read the paper and learn about what’s going on in their world.”
However, questions about the place of media are further complicated by the rise of misinformation and agenda-based reporting that challenges traditional media sources in a variety of ways.
While much of the misinformation that plagues our COVID-ridden society (pun not intended) appears to be aligned with far-right conspiracy theories or agendas, the comment with which I opened this piece, that sometimes you read a book and its relevance to events surrounding you just seems to grow exponentially, became even more true as I thought I read a report which detailed how journalistic practice is being eroded by voices on the far left, too, just as I was finishing off this piece.
I feel a bit bad, really. I pressed Ayliffe quite strongly about views that media sensationalise or editorialise news stories in such a way that makes it difficult to clearly differentiate fact, opinion, and context. Yet he patiently steps through his answers with that careful, deliberate manner. “I think that every good journalist will agree that their job is to report the truth. And I think that good journalism is not sensationalising things,” he says quite firmly. The Enemy Within takes a long hard look at how a lack of care when reporting on certain issues can inadvertently serve as recruiting campaigns for dangerous groups and ideologies, so its particularly interesting to hear him speak on this.
He uses the example of the 2019 Christchurch terrorist attack after which the New Zealand Prime Minister declared a refusal to speak the name of the perpetrator to deny him the platform he’d sought to draw attention to his white supremacist ideology. Ayliffe notes, that although it’s “tricky around that stuff,” we “tried to remove him from able to be part of a propaganda machine for broader cause.” He points out, “if you want to know why this person did it, sure, you can find that out pretty quickly, and we will tell you that in the story, but it’s not the focus of the story […] The easy thing is to dive straight in to get inside the mind of a psychopath and what he said in his manifesto, but if you do all that, then you’re actually you’re doing what he wanted you to do.”
He ends by reiterating his stance that, “the media has a responsibility to […] report stories for the people who are affected by that story and for the victims, not the perpetrators.”
Where Ayliffe is less circumspect is commenting on the cultures where this careful reporting is less prevalent. “America has been really good at inadvertently making heroes out of villains, because you want to know […] who is this evil bastard who did this thing. So [if] you start writing profiles about the killer, that puts them on a pedestal in a really twisted way for other people,” he says, adding, “I think most journalists are going to agree that you can actually report on the Christchurch massacre, without sending the balance towards what could then be used as a celebration of a psychopath and what motivated him.” He concludes with the observation, “I think, particularly that we’ve seen in the United States on the left and the right, in terms of media coverage, is where it can actually be detrimental, because where do you find that centre ground? And the best journalism is done in the centre.”
That centrist approach is encapsulated by his protagonist, Bailey, a recovering alcoholic who Ayliffe says “took a long time to get to this space,” especially given the death of his longtime love, Sharon Dexter, at the end of book two (don’t worry, it was a spoiler for me, too). Ayliffe admits, “I got quite emotional writing that,” and he had “such an overwhelming response from readers who were pretty angry with me.” But he’s clear that Baily is a deeply sustainable character for him, as he acknowledges, that although he has other ideas, “I’ll write probably another, I don’t know, five or ten Bailey books.”
Alyiffe’s writing schedule is an impressive one. “On the weekends I’ll write early,” he explains. As he goes on to outline his schedule, I feel increasingly slothful. “I’ve got a really busy day job which I love. So I’d actually don’t really do too much of it during the week,” he notes. Instead, “five thirty in the morning [I get up and write] for a few hours on Saturday, and then maybe a few more on Sunday.” Having given his old study up to his 11-year-old daughter (he’s speaking to me from there, which explains the decidedly un-studylike décor I noted when we first joined the call but couldn’t find a way to politely ask about), he writes wherever he can find space, with the view of, “if you want to write, you’ll find a place to write and you’ll find a way to do it.”
In the way of people who are very busy, he establishes clear boundaries across his time, telling me, “I’ve tried to remove it a bit from our family life. […] my favourite time of the week is watching the kids play sport on Saturday morning. And I might get a few hours of writing in before that.”
He admits, “I’m constantly thinking about my books […] I don’t really ever tap out,” which means that when he starts a book, “I’ll tend to know enough to get going. And then I’ll write enough of the book, and then stop and then I’ll go okay, how does this book now, unfold? How’s it sitting? And then I’ll pretty much plan it all out. And then as I write it, I may deviate from the path but I will mostly plot everything out.”
The care and consideration to the way he structures his time is the same sort of care with which he constructed The Enemy Within, the same kind with which he speaks about his work as both an author and a journalist. When I tell him how much I enjoyed reading the book, he’s genuinely delighted: “Even though I’m you know, trying to shine a light in a dark place, it’s got to be a gripping story, doesn’t it? And that’s most important for me, [the reader has to] enjoy the ride and learn a little bit of something about the world at the same time.”
It’s a really beautiful approach to stories, and how we engage with concerning issues. When I note my own concern about the apparent growth of some very nasty attitudes in society, he takes a beat to consider. “It really does worry me that we’ve got this far right nationalist movement growing around the world. And in some ways, it’s going unchecked. And a lot of that is [because of] dark web and social media chat rooms where people get to share their own hate with each other and feel like they’re part of something bigger when, in fact, they’re part of something very tiny,” he admits.
I ask him point-blank if he remains optimistic, given all of this. He pauses. “It’s a tough question,” he acknowledges, “but I’m a bit I am a glass half full guy. So even if the glass gets down to half full, I’m always gonna side with ‘things are going to be all right’. Because I do think that the world is in a better place than it was 100 years ago; I think even though we’re going through some odd and rocky periods at the moment, I would like to think that a smarter, better world, will prevail.”
It’s comforting thing to hear that someone who sees things on a daily basis that can be quite depressing and alarming believes in a positive future. In an era where it can be frustrating to see the conduct of media outlets, speaking with Ayliffe not only reassures. It reinvigorates.
