A British writer chases the melody in Romania

British writer Mike Ormsby talks about his recent novel on child sorcery in Congo, life in a quiet village in Transylvania, after he travelled the world and his faith in the healing power of music and words. “A bad novel is a table that wobbles. A good novel is a solid table. I don’t know if my novel wobbles, I hope not,” Mike Ormsby says laughing. Judging by the good reviews his book Child Witch has been receiving, it did not 'wobble'. We meet a few hours before the Bucharest launch of his two-part book Child Witch Kinshasa/ Child Witch London. Mike is tall, slender and in his 50s. A former BBC journalist, he first arrived in Romania in 1994, reporting about an aid convoy to Craiova. Twenty years later, he lives in a small, quiet village in Transylvania. Mike got the idea for his most recent novel in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he went with his Romanian wife Angela to train journalists. It was 2002 and the country was torn in half, after years of civil war, which resulted in the deaths of 5.4 million people since 1998. Tens of thousands of kids were living on the streets, many of them kicked out of their homes because they were accused of sorcery. A mix of poverty, traditions, and torn-apart families made people believe in sorcery. There are no accidents in Congo, Mike explains. If you crash your car or your mom loses her job, for us it’s bad luck, but in Congo they’ll look for a sorcerer who’s done it. “They don’t choose the local boxer or the weight lifter. They’ll choose a little kid. A girl who has a bad eye or a boy who’s opinionated.” Through a French priest who had a refuge for these kids, they met a boy whose back was badly burned because of exorcism. He became a character in Mike’s book. He wrote the novel in ten years. He missed several New Year’s Eves, typing and hoping that he would finish this draft by the New Year. But he knew he had to write the novel. “I could not not write the story. Congo needs to be fixed. It’s a broken country and these kids need help.” * “Writing is not easy. It’s a real craft. It’s nuts and bolts,” says Mike, taking a sip of the strong coffee Angela just made. “I don’t want to mystify it. It’s like making a car. It’s like making a cake.” Mike and Angela are in their Bucharest apartment, which overlooks the Natural Park Vacaresti, a protected area, a delta where over 100 species of wild birds and animals live. In the morning you can hear lots of birds, says Angela. She is her mid-40s, has short hair and seems a passionate, yet discreet person. She has trained NGOs in conflict areas all over the world. She is also Mike’s first-hand editor and his “guardian angel”. Mike says that a few years ago, teenagers would come and start fires in various parts of this delta. When firemen would arrive and put off the fire, they would start it in some other parts of the natural park. Now the delta is green and quiet. A girl lies on a blanket and sunbathes. “Sometimes I felt like I was ironing a sheet with a warm spoon,” Mike says. “I must have written 10 drafts. Angela read every each of them. The novel has some 250,000 words. But even though it’s a long book, the chapters are very short. I wanted to be like a detective story from the very first story.” He writes from three main angles. The hardest was writing from the perspective of a small Congolese boy. “When he hears about Jesus Christ, he says Jesus Cross. He doesn’t know much about Jesus or religion.”