Wild energy of a born writer
Francis King
Antony Sher may not be the best actor of his generation, but he is certainly the most exciting. The source of that excite- ment is an energy, at once rapturous and demonic, which fills him as a hurricane fills a sail, to sweep him irresistibly onwards. In the three finest performances of his career, as Malvolio, Shylock and Richard III, it was useless to look for subtleties of inter- pretation; but if one left the theatre unillu- minated, one also left it in a state of exhilaration, as one is always exhilarated by physical virtuosity and daring.
Sher has now written a novel, the domi- nant characteristic of which is this same electric and electrifying energy. Energy surges through the book, in contrast to the torpor of its chief character, a middle-aged child-man born Zeev Zali but renamed Smous (the Afrikaans for hawker or ped- dler) on his arrival, an immigrant knowing neither English nor Afrikaans, in South Africa in the immediate aftermath of the Boer War. This energy impels Sher to write his novel, as he creates his extraor- dinary stage performances, in a thick, churning impasto, his brush slashing on the lurid colours of genocide, exploitation, murder, maiming, miscegenation and rape with frenzied abandon. The people de- picted by Sher himself on his cover are seen as long-necked, dung-coloured carica- tures; and it is as caricatures that they strut and preen in the novel.
An uncle and cousin, both doctors fear- ful of threatening pogroms, have preceded Smous to South Africa from Lithuania. Smous himself is despatched to join them, in order to prepare the way for the rest of his family. But there could be no more feeble or feckless pioneer. At home, he has reached his late thirties without marrying, doing any kind of job, or showing an interest in any activity other than, literally, watching the world go by from his mother's kitchen window. In South Africa, he is like a scrap of paper, blown hither and thither on the winds of the passion of those Boers, English, half-castes, blacks — into whose company he drifts or is sucked. So complete is his gormlessness that, not only is he incapable of speaking a word of either Afrikaans or English after a sojourn of more than two years, but he witnesses the most appalling acts of brutality over an extended period before at long last when a black child is about to be deliber- ately maimed by a Boer — being aroused to intervene. Frequently he either vomits or soils himself, as though literally attemp- ting to evacuate experiences of which he is incapable of dealing.
The country depicted in the novel is as malign as the people. But, unlike the people, nearly all of them as grotesque in their appearance as their behaviour, the country is also extraordinarily beautiful. An energy pulsates through it as furious as that which pulsates through the writing. When humans or animals have perished or are even still in the process of perishing, their bodies are at once lacerated and devoured by predators. This ravenous feeding of organisms on each other extends to the English oppression of the Boers and the Boer oppression of the blacks.
It would be foolish to regard this novel as a literal transcription of experience. Smous's constant misadventures, many of them in the company of a native girl, are as unrealistic as the innocence which makes him continue to believe, into his late thirties, that a woman can conceive by swallowing a man's seed, and that the normal period of a pregnancy is a year. In a realistic world, people would be more likely to exploit than to befriend someone so foolish and helpless.
The other characters belong more to a world of fairytale and allegory than to one of history. April, the oddly named male Xhosa servant first of an English gold- prospector and then of a Boer, dementedly spouts Shakespeare, like some RSC actor suffering from delirium. At one point Middlepost — the remote settlement in which Smous lands up — is visited by an itinerant Italian couple who, hardly less improbably (if one thinks in realistic terms) act both as barbers and as opera-singers, transporting a piano with them across the Karoo. .
Whether by design or not, the dialogue is wildly eccentric — especially in the book's first quarter. When not making remarks like `Meck-necked and ship-eyed — that's me', or 'If your idea of slap-happy times is a wobble in the dark with a wild animal, then be my guest', the characters are giving vent to such exclamations as `Huhn?', 'Agr, `Hail!', Waalaar , `Tscheer , 'Tsssr and `Yaak r Many of the scenes of torture and death imprint themselves on the imagination as a landscape seen momentarily in a lightning- flash imprints itself on the eyeballs. A particularly powerful image is that of an ostrich, awkward, ugly, half-starved and yet capable of murderous harm, which is kept confined in a pen far too small for it. It seems to represent the spirit of a country which the whites can never hope wholly to tame or perpetually to keep in captivity.
Smous's relationship with the black girl is even more important than his rela- tionships with the Englishman and the Boer. When she is delivered of the child which Smous, in his ignorance of the facts of life, believes to be his but which, in fact, is the Boer's, she buries it, still alive, in a shallow grave. Appalled, Smous berates her: . . You're not civilised enough to be pagan. You are without a soul, like a beast. No. Beasts feel more than you . . .' The chilling horror of the moment is intensified by the fact that she can understand not a word of what he is saying to her in Yiddish.
Overlong, often overwritten and even- tually monotonous in its jocular accumula- tion of atrocity on atrocity, this is a far from perfect novel. But one returns to those words 'energy' and 'exciting'. Here is a remarkable debut by someone clearly as much a born writer as a born actor.
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