Gall is divided into three parts
Lucy Hughes-Hallett
MASAI DREAMING by Justin Cartwright Macmillan, £14.99, pp.291 Ai anthropologist, female, a French Jew, is telling her 11 year-old brother about the Masai, among whom she lived for five years before returning to Europe in 1944. 'Cattle are for them more important than anything else.' This is a cattle truck, you know,' says the boy.
That verbal coincidence, and another about scientists' mistaken quest for 'final solutions', seem to be all there is, beyond synchronicity and happenstance, to pin together the disparate masses of sombre and portentous material contained in Justin Cartwright's ambitious novel. Yet for all its (I think deliberate) ideological muzziness, the book works well, as story, as a compendium of reflections on race and nationhood, and as a novel with a refined and distinctive narrative voice and one marvellously complete character, the old white Kenyan, Tom Fairfax.
Tim Curtiz, a British journalist with a love-life troubled enough for him to be more than glad of an excuse to leave home for a while, has been commissioned to write a film script about Claudia Cohn- Casson, the anthropologist whose career ended in Auschwitz. His account of his sojourn in Africa, researching the subject, alternates with extracts from the script he is writing and a third-person account of the 'We've turned it into a little goldmine' machinations of the other present-day characters. The main plot — Claudia's story — is thus doubly distanced. Following Curtiz around, we know how incomplete and suspect is the information on which the script is based. As he candidly admits, he has no clear notion of what she was like. Besides, doubt is repeatedly cast on the truthfulness of his medium. Curtiz's employer is a lunching, womanising, tennis- playing Californian film producer named S 0 Letterman. Curtiz thinks Letterman is cynical and sentimental. Letterman finds Curtiz absurd. 'He thinks he's writing a fucking PhD thesis, not a film script' he exclaims, reading aloud Curtiz's lead-in to the cattle-truck episode. 'Bit depressing, mut?' agrees his assistant.
S 0 Letterman knows what the holocaust has to do with a tribe of African pastoral- ists: they are both expressions of something he knows as 'the universal spirit', some- thing indefinable but highly saleable whose function is to 'counter the banality of human life in the suburbs and malls of our countries'. His film will end with a sunset, a mountain, a tiny, heroic aeroplane, a huge, heroic crowd of African extras, some uplift- ing chanting and the vague, irrational and dishonest suggestion that all these things somehow ennoble what happened at Auschwitz, and make it all right. Cohn-Cas- son also believed in a 'universal spirit', one whose nature could be established by com- paring what anthropologists of her genera- tion still unabashedly called 'primitive' cultures and the societies of the West. Cur- tiz doesn't buy either notion: nor does Cartwright.
The book's emotional centre is the rela- tionship between Curtiz and Tom Fairfax, who first appears at the Muthaiga Club looking like a caricature of the gentlemanly old colonial drunk but develops into a sen- sitively imagined and potently attractive character as he reveals to Curtiz, a scrap at a time, the story of his long-ago love for Cohn-Casson. Cartwright sets up a compar- ison between two worlds, an old one in which Fairfax and the Masai jointly repre- sent dignity, frugality and integrity, and a new one in which Letterman falls for a transsexual and casts Julia Roberts as a Frenchwoman, a world in which authentici- ty has no value and all identities are up for sale. No prizes for guessing which he prefers.
Curtiz breaks his contract and saves his honour. Cartwright allows the ending of Letterman's meretricious film to end his novel too, but while he makes use of the rhetoric of popular cinema, he undercuts it too. His book falls into three component parts, corresponding to its three settings, Modern Africa is naturalistic and emotion- ally subtle. Bygone Africa is poignantly romantic. Modern Europe is cleverly satiri- cal. The first is by quite a long way the most engaging, but the three cohere to form an elegantly complex, unfailingly intelligent novel.
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