Lost white dogs of Africa
Tom Hiney
THE QUARRY by Damon Galgut Atlantic Books, £12.99, pp. 224, ISBN 1843542935 kt, £11.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 There is a fading misconception in Europe that every white person in South Africa lives the life of Reilly, albeit behind a barbed-wire perimeter fence. The fact is that, apart from all the hardworking white postmen and store clerks, genuine white trash abounds, booted out of one too many doors by bosses and wives and daughters' boyfriends. They walk the streets, live in small townships and paint houses if they don't drink the paint first. There are quite a lot of them, presumably more now than ever. Emigrating to Canada or Europe is not really an option for these lost white dogs of Africa. The high commissions wouldn't let them in the door.
I picked up such a hitchhiker once, about 40 years old, on the road to Cape Town. He was standing by a bridge and confided to me soon after we got going that he had been standing there minutes before considering whether to jump off. It was a conversational icebreaker of sorts, and a chicken pie a while later bought the rest of his story. Madness in Angola, farm jobs and women lost, drink and prison. As Robert Frost wrote: 'Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in.' Not in South Africa.
The existence of poor whites makes South Africa a country that, say, Kenya could never be. I was once up in the dustbowl of the Northern Cape when I came across a town at a dirt-track mission crossroads. There was a sign for the old gallows, a derelict hotel and a small market-place. In the market sat a 70year-old white man in a suit with his old coloured girlfriend/wife, behind a table on which were stacked seven or eight avocados. Their horse and cart were nearby. Maybe he was a half-caste. But Cecil Rhodes he was not.
This novel takes place in such a town, and concerns such people and their cousins: the sort of place where everyone still puts on their best clothes to go to the cheapskate circus that visits them twice a year. It's John Steinbeck with anthills. As such it is an extremely atmospheric book in a hazy, raw and entirely realistic sense. These are the sorts of places where yuppies do not buy holiday homes.
Galgut's story suggests that such points on the map, despite their ghostly quiet, are seething with repressed violence, ready to explode should the right catalyst enter town. Maybe he's right, but these are not the Catholic tropics. They can certainly be intense places, but my own feeling is that they are more melting than they are exploding. Deprived of old apartheid subsidies, these towns are losing their children to the cities and their pets to the rooikats. Even if you were feeling crazy it could take you a day to find someone to pick a fight with.
But publishers like crime stories, even if they let good writers get away with whydunnits rather than any pretence at sleuthing. There is a mystery in this book: how do the semi-Calvinist inhabitants of this depopulated hourglass survive in conditions that would test a Buddhist monk? The answer is that they don't really. They are bored to the point of surreality — Olympians of the loose end — and Galgut captures that mood extremely closely.
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