Journeys to the heartland

Mary Hope

Kruger's Alp Christopher Hope (Heinemann £8.95) The Wall of the Plague Andre Brink (Faber & Faber £9.95) Short of Glory Alan Judd (Hodder & Stoughton £8.95)

After the death in detention of Dr Neil Aggett, there was a parliamentary debate in Cape Town, during which one Nationalist MP attacked the Opposition's objections to his prolonged solitary con- finement. How could they complain, he asked, when the inquest had revealed that, far from being alone, Dr Aggett had been interrogated for 15 hours a day? How to eari such random, casual, crass, callous everyday lunacies is a challenge which Christopher Hope (no relation of the

present reviewer) tackles with bitter alle- gorical sparkle, Andre Brink with his usual

romantic rhetorical fury, and Alan Judd With a cool, British diplomatic eye. Hope does well to follow his first, exuberantly cynical novel, A Separate Dev- elopment, with a far more biting and dense allegory which, for full effect, demands and rewards a detailed knowledge of cur-

rent South African events and personali- ties. Blanchaille is a priest whose mentor, Father Lynch, trains his altar boys in Political realities. The Catholic Church and the regime are both after the same thing:

. all power institutions could be expected to adapt in similar ways. Their trick was to forbid individual alterations to the status quo While presenting their own changes as a genuine response to popular demands and altered circumstances . .

LYnch has also instilled into his acolytes the dream of discovering the lost gold of the exiled President Kruger, together with a. haven for the keepers of the faith of the

Volk. The novel is Blanchaille's quest, during which pilgrimage he meets every

kind of self-server and all actions of the

regime are seen as far removed from the tenets they are supposed to enforce.

dissidents is what it seems: policemen are in disguise, comrades are traitors, self-interest is king and morality,

,of any kind, is dead. It is a completely bleak view, bursting with very naughty jokes about thinly disguised contemporary South African events and figures, but there Is enough detail to fill in the background for readers not fully conversant with such

bizarre episodes as the Soviet-Anglo- American pussy-footing, or the Informa- tion Scandal. By using Blanchaille as a holy innocent, Hope allows explanations of the more arcane contortions of South African politics, while letting his essentially boisterous poetic imagination rip along the allegorical front. His invention never flags and his scathing intelligence forcefully points up the sheer, outrageous contradic- tions of the system:

. . . of course he realises that the American Declaration of Independence was a docu-

ment so advanced in its political thinking that, had it been promulgated that day in South Africa . . . it would have been shred- ded on the spot and its adherents exiled or arrested, banned, imprisoned or tortured as wild men beyond the civilised pale.

Towards the end of his pilgrimage, Blan- chaille is shown a film of young soldiers dead on the border: 'civilisations may have died of old age, or decadence, or boredom, or neglect, but what you are seeing for the first time is a nation going to the wall for its belief in the sanctity of separate lavator- ies . . .'. Anger honed into the bitterest satire and wielded by an acute intelligence which dances most entertainingly around the unacceptable with splendid vigour and bite; but also a plangent lament for the loss of national morality.

Andre Brink does keep coming back like a great shaggy dog with bigger and bigger bones of well-intentioned schmalz. He is the ffotherington-Thomas (hello clouds, hello sky) of liberal South Africa, whose completely respectable pain and anger are constantly vitiated by the overwhelming soppiness of his style. This has something to do — as he himself has recognised in one of his essays — with the fact that English is a language which only awkwardly carries the weight of emotional content which can be borne by Afrikaans (his first language). It also has to do with a basic coarseness of perception and sensibility. Here one does not find the justifiably coarse edge of Christopher Hope's satire. Brink can be accused of much, but not of a sense of humour. One finds only portentous leaden- ess of style. It is an account of another voyage — of self-awareness as well as into political consciousness. Andrea is a Cape coloured girl in exile in France since falling foul of the Immorality Act with an English lectur- er. Her present lover, a white South 'I shall sleep at tnv club tonight'.

African exile, sends her to research a film on the Great Plague (used as a fairly ill-assimilated symbol for racism through- out the book) on a tour in Provence, which parallels two previous journeys she has made with him and her English lover. She is to decide whether to marry him, have his child, commit herself to exile. Unwisely, he sends along a black activist, on the run, one infers, from the Security Branch. Inevitably — this being Brink — there is an earth-moving coupling and she realises that her destiny is to return to 'her' people. This is a short spin through what is an immense- ly long, well-plotted and many-layered narrative which contains much that is well-told, painful and true about life in South Africa. The theme of self-discovery is a respectable one, and the anger and grief involved in any such account are moving and honest. What Brink says about forced removals, torture, detention, and life in District Six is all certainly true. It is the leaden touch which sinks it: I undid the buttons of my shirt, very slowly, took off my shirt and bra and went to him, unhurried . . . I thought, Yes, of course he was right, this is how it is, so self-evident and complex: the truth of the body, which is flesh and bone, which can be hurt, which bleeds, which suffers from hunger and thirst, and from the desire to know, which affirms its ineluctable humanity . . . we were like trees: with branches and leaves that do not simply react to wind but reply to it, rebel against it, co-exist with it, affirming their very treeness in the act — even when the wind strips them bare . . .

I mean, no one writes like that, do they? Even a well-educated coloured girl from Cape Town.

More worrying, joking aside, is the choice the girl makes: to return to her people because of one act of love with a virile black. This is the author falling for the worst white cliché (they have such a sense of rhythm, you know) as well as for a stance which is potentially as racist as the apartheid he wishes to reject.

Alan Judd's novel is on one level a splendid romp through British embassy corridors and, on another, a young man's book about the difficulty and misfiring of moral decisions. Set coyly in 'Lower Afri- ca', it follows Patrick Stubbs, Third Secret- ary, through unsuccessful love, bureau- cratic ineptitude and confused adventure in the hunt for a vanished diplomat who turns out to have, as they say in ex-Rhodesia, 'taken the gap'. The author has a fine comic gift, an awareness of the moral issues and a good line in characters, rang- ing from the officious Clifford Steggles, Head of Chancery, whose over- organisation is constantly being sabotaged by the eccentric ambassador, to the free- lance sleuth, Chatsworth, a blundering gem, blithely unconscious of his effect on all around him, black and white: a totally believable, genuinely original creation of whom I hope to read much more. The plot is pretty feeble, but the comic incident a delight. Don't look for very deep insights into Southern Africa: just enjoy.