Does the truth really set us free?

The Lies We Shared  by Sarah Penny

(Penguin, R200)

The Lies We Shared, set in England and Africa, is Sarah Penny’s second novel, and richly redolent and evocative of the landscapes of of these polar opposites.

This novel is rooted in the African earth and the heart of the story comes from the narrator’s love of the land.

We meet Rebecca Falconer on a cold wintry morning in London as she wakes in a cheerless bedsit. Her 70-year-old mother has just died, and she journeys to her parents’ home in Dorset for the funeral. The other central people in her life are her father, Dickie, her brother, Howard, and his pregnant wife.

They are refugees from Zimbabwe – just a year previously her parents were thrown off their farm courtesy of President Robert Mugabe’s land invasion policies. Mother, father and daughter fled to England, where Howard had already settled and made a home.

Rebecca feels rootless in London, where she experiences debilitating panic attacks.

With time off over the December break, Rebecca decides to travel
to Kenya, where her mother, Elizabeth, was born, grew up and married her first husband.

Only after her husband was murdered did her mother migrate south to Zimbabwe.

Rebecca’s knowledge of her mother’s past is sketchy. On a whim she decides to visit the farmhouse, Ol Lokop, where her mother spent her early life and a few of the years of that first marriage.

It’s been nearly 50 years since her mother lived at Ol Lokop, where her first husband was murdered by a Kenyan servant, a man more friend than servant, who had known his victim for over a decade.

The farm is now owned by a young couple, who have rondavels for rent, and Rebecca settles in, seeking something – clues to her mother’s life, a hope of belonging, infused with a deep, burning ache for Africa and grief over the loss of the family farm in Zimbabwe .

The narrative moves between present and past. Rebecca, born in 1969, grew up during the War of Independence, a time of uncer-tainty, bomb-proof vehicles, a time when fear was as ever-present and as real as the smell of smoke.

Children learned to know and handle guns and witnessed death first hand: “When I was a little kid, during the war, I used to be scared a lot of the time… I never thought it would be nicer not to be scared because I’d never lived in a
country at peace.”

The unhappy experience of having lived through a war comes through powerfully, the past recalled in such lavishly detailed passages.

It had been assumed that the farm would eventually pass to Rebecca, and her love for it, Zimbabwe and the land remains evident throughout the novel.

Meanwhile, Rebecca ponders the past her mother never spoke about, and through the young couple who now run the farm she meets the elderly Grant Windermere, frail and close to death, a man who knew her mother and her first husband. At this point the novel becomes thriller-like in intensity.

In this outstanding novel, we journey with Rebecca as she moves closer to an understanding of what occurred – a truth, or a set of lies she never suspected existed.

Past and present intertwine as Rebecca lives vividly in both, edging towards the precipice of understanding.

The Lies We Shared is rich in other details too – this is also a story about the farm invasions and their devastating impact on the lives of the farmers and their families who had to flee the country.

But this is primarily a story about a fractured relationship between mother and daughter, of Rebecca’s closely-observed psychological journey toward some kind of resolution.

Rebecca’s immersion in the land and lives of some of the Kenyans she encounters adds to the rich seam of strands that make up this story.

Ultimately, this is about the lies we choose to tell, and sometimes to keep, in order that we may go on living, whatever the cost, and whatever the damage done.

Published in The Star, June 9 2011

Review of An Intimate War by Donvé Lee

THE intimate war – that closed battleground between a couple, fought within the confines of coupledom but, at times, no less bloody and messy and horrific than that fought between thousands in so many public war zones.

And, even harder to understand, both for those within the intimacy of that personal zone and those standing by watching the wrestling of two people, is being unable to comprehend or to help.

This novel charts the unsteady, murky territory of the relationship between an unnamed man and a woman. They come together, move apart, and come together again, drawn time and again by the passion that unites them, despite the destructive forces that run through their relationship.

As reader, you know what you’re in for from the moment you read the opening line: “The first time we divorced we did it on a serviette,” a divorce that leads once more, to undressing and “our limbs entangled with the limbs of the tree, my feet rooted in the ground my arm stretched out to the sky”. We’re in the tangled, twisted territory of attraction here, and so the narration continues.

The prose is poetry, almost dreamy, the story is told almost entirely in the present-tense, with Lee using the second person point of view to tell the story, the narrator addressing the text to the you of the man she seemingly cannot separate from. This can be a difficult device to sustain – although Lee manages it with a skill that means you read effortlessly, and it carries you along so that you don’t notice the unorthodox narration. The lack of quotation marks around speech adds to the dreamy, surreal quality of this story, and yet the tale is anything but dreamy.

Lee’s style is to use run-on, made up compound words, punctuation sometimes discarded in an effort to let the text flow on, again a style that evokes the half-wavy, half-seen dream world.

Instead what follows is heartbreaking, all too real, and not dream-like at all. It’s the poignant story of a man and woman who will find their love stretched and broken by the man’s inability to trust the woman. His turbulent, volatile emotions destroy their world, even though the woman tries to hold on, her love somehow intact, strong, always trying to mend his shattered soul.

It’s not hard to see why she carries on trying, the eroticism of the man’s love is forcefully expressed. Despite his own wounds this is a man who “is handing me back to myself. “Through the promise in your eyes. Beneath the balm of your voice. Under the miracle of your tongue.” He buys her a full-length mirror, encourages her to explore and love her body, despite its plumpness that she so despises, or has despised. And in tender love scenes that most intimate act assumes its beauty and power through Lee’s poetic touch.

And yet, within the love, poison: “A carapace has begun to grow over my soft centre. Your offerings of flowers have lost their innocence. They are bittersweet pills you feed me in an attempt to erase the latest bruises on my heart. It’s not your flowers I want, it’s your trust.”

Instead the narrator finds herself defending her decision to wear lipstick when she goes out, with the man accusing her of trying to attract other men, and the violent cycle has begun: “My daughter watches and she learns about the things women do to please their men.”

And still, the push and pull continues, coming together, driven apart, desire and love morph into despair and the therapist’s eyes assume the woman’s pain, and still the rollercoaster of it all continues, an intimate love closed to the understanding of outsiders.

Why do we love the people we do, and how can we untangle ourselves from destructive passions? There are no answers, simply the continuing tide of love through it all.

Published in The Star, April 7 2011

Desert and desire become one

The Impostor by Damon Galgut
Penguin R163

This is a quiet, powerful story, a novel trimmed of excess, where every word means what it should. A handful of characters dominate the terrain of The Impostor, set in a small, sleepy Karoo town. This is a pared-down novel, running at just over 200 pages and yet huge in impact. It draws you in from the moment you begin, and keeps you mesmerised. Quietly. There is no gore; there are, seemingly, no cliffhangers.

And yet, peer beneath the surface and Galgut exposes the gore inherent in all our lives. This is a novel steeped in the realities of life in South Africa today, with its edge of corruption, its contradictions and its searing beauty against complex realities. "The guards and the thieves were the same people - there's South Africa in a nutshell," says a character halfway through the story.

It opens on the day that Adam Napier drives into a sleepy Karoo town. He's going to take up residence in the abandoned home that his wealthier brother Gavin bought some years ago. On the way there he is stopped by a traffic cop for running a stop street and is outraged when he's asked to pay a bribe to ensure the fine goes away. But Adam won't pay, he's just lost his job and his home, one of the reasons he's moving into this abandoned house. The scene sets the tone, revealing Adam as an upright and somewhat indignant man. It's only one of the traits that will set him apart in a country and a place where it's sometimes just so much easier to pay a bribe.
Adam, who once published a book of poems as a young man, is determined to begin writing poetry again after 20 years of silence and working in a faceless corporation. Forced out by affirmative action, injury is added because he didn't see it coming, that the young black junior was being groomed to replace him.

Choosing to spend the first night in the house, even before the electricity and water have been turned on, Adam experiences the first of many strange nights, with only his thoughts for company and a yearning to again write the poetry that just won't come.

His neighbour is a silent man in blue overalls and with steely grey hair, a man nearing old age. The first sighting is accompanied by a look that does not lead to an introduction, but the quiet shutting of doors.

Adam's life carries on, quiet days followed by quiet nights, with only his own thoughts and regrets for company. Then one day he bumps into Canning at a local shop. Canning, left money by the father he hated, inherited a game farm, Gondwana, just outside town. Adam will spend the first of many weekends there, drinking toxic blue cocktails and admiring Canning's black wife, Baby. Canning reveres Adam from their boarding school days, although Adam can barely remember him. But Adam returns again and again, drawn by desire for Baby.

Events move slowly, inevitably to a climax. Things are not what they seem at Gondwana, and changes are afoot. Canning will benefit from this new South Africa ? and not just by acquiring a desirable black wife.

Part of the beauty and power of this novel lies in Galgut's finely-tuned use of language. The Karoo comes alive under his pen, a stark harsh Karoo baking in the sun, full of spiky plants and hard, tough earth. Dialogue is carefully pared down and measured. There are no superfluous pages of conversation, and Galgut has an ear for South African idiom and expression.

As Adam tries to makes sense of the changes that will befall the game farm and all their lives, he is taken on a helicopter ride with Canning. "It comes to him that time is the great distorting lens.
Up close, human life is a catalogue of pain and power, but when enough time has gone past, everything ceases to matter. Nothing that people do to each
other will carry any moral charge eventually. History is just like the ground down there: something neutral and observable, a pattern, a shape."

With The Impostor Damon Galgut once more firmly establishes himself as a writer of immense and strange power. A writer who can carry the mettle of greatness without a wobble.

First published in The Star, Tonight May 22 2008

Debut effort heralds greater things to come

Whiplash by Tracey Farren
Modjaji Books R150

The cover of this debut novel leads you in. If covers sell books and attract readers, then designer Natascha Griessel has done her job. The simple, yet effective, predominantly blue-hued cover with the elongated shadow of a woman on the road sets the scene.

This ground-breaking novel centres on a year in the life of a white prostitute in Cape Town. It's set in Muizenberg, when the suburb was still sleazy. Tess, 26 years old and addicted to painkillers, turns tricks to make a living. Fifty bucks will generally do it. Getting into strangers' cars, or lying beside freeways, she takes her life in her hands every time she accepts a new client. She has no pimp and works only by day. Yet the ever-present danger of her line of work is presented again and again: one woman is fatally slit from throat to stomach, another takes a beating.

The topic of Whiplash is unusual, uncomfortable and daring. Prostitutes are so far out of sight in our polite society. We don't think about them or accord the anonymous women on the side of the road names or lives. Yet in Whiplash, Farren has done the seemingly impossible: she has created, in the fun and spunky Tess, a likeable character. In part this is due to the humour that runs through the narrative.

These may be desperate times, and Tess is down on her luck, an addict, a prostitute, living from one day to the next, but she is no desperado, no wanna-be suicide.

There is, always, a sense that this is just for now. As she lies in her bath, she dreams of a life that could be: "I'll live with a big man. Maybe a body builder ? I'll have sculptures put up at my heated pool? I'll float round on a big, puffy lilo. When he gets home from work he'll kiss me on the forehead."

Farren, an ex-journalist, gleaned a lot of her information from talking to prostitutes and her astute observation shows in the details of this book. The language is earthy and real, fast-paced and breathless, yet underscored with wit: "The sun is flippin' desperate, thinks it's gonna die young or something. It stings my cheeks, makes wet patches under my arms." Or this: "The flat's still full of the shock of the blast. The air's still scared. ? I gobble two Adcodol, lock the last two back in my boot. God, I want more."

This almost light-hearted tone informs the novel, which tends to liven the mood of what could have been a depressing read.

Tess lives in False Bay Holiday, with the missing word, Flats, nailed onto a fence at a tyre repair shop. That's the kind of place it is. And peopled by Madeleine, sewing to make a living, and mourning her missing husband. Tess has friends like Annie, soon to follow her boyfriend to Joburg, or Princess with a broken face. In-between there are the clients such as a cop who gets freebies in exchange for his silence, or the man in a marriage made tight by the fact that he and his wife can't have children, a man whom she soon is befriending.

This is a book begun as an address to her mother back in Durban, a mother whose influence has shaped Tess, and also shapes the story, as absent as she may be. There's also the ghost of her stepfather Graham, still alive, but you can barely call him that, felled by a stroke, impassive, silent in his wheelchair. The past weaves into the present, and as the story progresses, we learn why Tess remains haunted by these two people who shaped her, and why she drifted into the life of a prostitute.

But something's got to break and this comes in the form of a broken condom. Before long, Tess realises that her sudden craving for fish points to a larger problem.

What happens after becomes a turning point for Tess, and the story pivots on this decision. It remains a roller-coaster of a journey and as readers we are led through by Farren's confident, jazzy prose.

Some of the novel could have been cut in order to get to the heart of the story. However, this is an assured book and marks the debut of a startling new voice on the South African literary scene.

Published in The Star Tonight September 4 2008

Life once the fairytale's over

Marriage Vows by Gail Schimmel Kwela Books R165

It's Jordi Gordan's 55th birthday. Happily married to Hal since her early 20s, she rises on this birthday, and looks in the mirror. "I pull the skin on my face tight by placing my hands on my cheeks and pulling back, toying with the idea of a face-lift ? I let my face fall back and poke at my crow's feet - the wrinkles gather at my eyes like old ladies gossiping on a corner."

While Hal cooks her traditional birthday breakfast, she receives an SMS from Nico, the man who has skirted the boundaries of her life for more than 30 years, while she has remained happily married to the man now cooking her food. "This brief mourning is all that Nico is allowed of my birthday, and for a moment, seated on the toilet, I belong to Nico."

So begins a novel, in deceptively simple language, that explores what it means to love two men, yet to stay true to your own belief in the sanctity of marriage and the vows so quickly repeated.

The language is light, unadorned of excess or flowery adjectives. Jordi could be talking out loud as the narrative progresses. As such it might be easy to dismiss this book, yet this is a book that raises issues around infidelity, the nature of love, and whether to remain true to your feelings or your beliefs.

This is not a simple tale, although it is simply told. Marriage Vows, Gail Schimmel's debut novel, is as nuanced and layered as, well, yes a 10-tier wedding cake.

The novel moves between past and present, alternating between Jordi's 55th birthday and the memories of her life with Hal, and their two children, now grown, and the meeting with Nico. In London on a business trip, her husband and children back in Johannesburg, she meets the man who will haunt her.

Jordi kept me reading right till the end; she is a strong, yet heart-breaking character. Schimmel has painted her portrait in vivid strokes.

A successful businesswoman, Jordi has married her career with her family. On the night of her birthday she is hosting a business dinner party for her husband, instead of spending it with her family and friends. A first clue to Jordi's nature - somewhat selfless - is that she is sacrificing this night for Hal without much complaint.

We learn of a cherished sister, Belinda, who died of cancer, in love with a married man, and taking the secret of his identity to the grave with her. Infidelity and temptation lurk, cosy bedfellows.

The story is peopled by the other sister, Denise, cold and distant, and her mother makes an early appearance, talking mostly high school French as dementia takes hold.

There's Jordi's best friend, Sally, whose multiple marriages and the six children she had produced serve as foil to Jordi's own quiet, but loving and only marriage. "Sex on a stick," Sally says referring to her latest husband, Neil, 10 years her junior, but "recently I have started thinking that Sally's enthusiasm about Neil is sliding. Occasionally she lets slip a snide comment about pretty faces not being all they're cracked up to be."

The past and the present continue to intertwine. As Jordi shops, has lunch with Sally and prepares for the evening, a portrait of her marriage emerges. Throughout the years there's Nico, who Jordi met at the age of 30, but it's a relationship both push away for various reasons. Jordi's belief in her vows, Nico's need to stay close to a dying wife.

Timing, so important in relationships, jars and disconnects the two. When Nico remarries, Jordi feels pierced, yet when he offers to leave his second wife for her, again alignment is out of sync. Yet, the realisation has its effects: "The knowledge that Nico would leave his wife for me was bad. It seeped like poison through my thoughts, and its bitter fingers plucked at my day. Every time something went wrong, the thought would be there: I don't have to take this; I have an alternative."

As the novel builds to its climax, there's a breathless, almost thriller-like impulse in the reader to get to the end, to find out what happens. I was left just about shocked by the ending. Schimmel has revealed no clues. What remains is a sense of how memory distorts, and of how one can be so wrapped up in strong beliefs of the way a marriage should be that the truth of a relationship remains clouded.

Schimmel's strong craftsmanship moves this story along seamlessly weaving between the times. This is an important debut by a local writer of real power, and I look forward to reading her next novel.

Published in The Star Tonight November 20 2008

China memoir pulses with charm and pathos

Cracking China: A memoir of our first three years in China by Rod Mackenzie
Knowledge Thirst Media, R195

There's no surer way of knowing you've arrived in a foreign country and culture than to be greeted with the words that it's 11am, so it's time for lunch. Lunch? Yes lunch. It's just the beginning of the many differences that will confront and assault the sense of normality of Rod Mackenzie and his wife, known affectionately as the Chook.

They've arrived in China to teach English. All the way from South Africa to rain-soaked England, where a so-called career as a used car salesman doesn't pan out as expected. Next stop Shaoxing, China.

With his shaved head and larger-than-average girth, Mackenzie stands out like a sore thumb and is soon compared with pictures of Buddha. No matter. His infectious, bubbling personality soon wins over his high school students, who start to learn, not by rote, as has been the norm, but by laughter, fun and games.

First lesson for Mackenzie, memorising the names of his pupils, who have all given each other English names, which are rather prosaic and reveal the vast gaps that open up between languages.

There's Fish, Star, Ice Sucker - who got the name because "ice is nice to lick in summer" - and a female student who calls herself Boy, simply because she likes boys; then there's Sunshine, Answer, WC, Pig-pig and Twin A and B.

Mackenzie's writing is shot through with humour and there are many laugh-out-loud scenes. One day a TV crew arrives to shoot footage of the English teacher at work. Walking up to Fish, Mackenzie asks in front of the cameras, "How are you today, Fish?"

Mackenzie writes: "Fish was so mesmerised by the TV crew that he lost the precious bit of English he knew. His jaw wavered uncertainly. His friends translated my question for him, a phatic question he would have learned in his first English lessons at school four years ago... Bill, my next victim, fared far worse... he took one look at us, mouth agape, and ran away."

There are other vexations brought on by living in a foreign culture. When Mackenzie and his wife use what they think is a vase to put flowers in, the guffawing reactions of their Chinese friends enlighten them. They've been using Chinese versions of chamber pots.

And then there's the night they cook for their friends and wonder why they are eyeing the food with visible fear. "What was wrong with baked potatoes and a simple omelette? It was the same as a bowl of fish heads being repugnant to me while everyone else held the decapitated delicacies between their chopsticks and sucked and chewed on them until even the forlorn, round fish eyes disappeared into their mouths."

But there's pathos between the humour, and when Mackenzie and his wife pass cages of dogs, they try not to think what their final destination might be.

And through it all, Mackenzie, also an accomplished published poet, captures the strangeness of life in China through verse.

Cracking China pulses with charm and with Mackenzie's obvious love for the country that eventually cracks open for him. Read it for a foreigner's glimpse of a land that captivates, frustrates and delights, and, as always, fascinates.

Published in Pretoria News, July 5 2010 and The Star Tonight July 1 2010