Tiah Beautement chats to Michiel Heyns about his latest book 'Each Mortal Thing'

Each Mortal Thing 

Michiel Heyns, Umuzi

***** (5 stars)

Michiel Heyns’s latest novel is a beautiful and tender tribute to the friendships between men. Yet the first seeds of the idea were rooted in a much different story. “My original intention was to write a revenge novel,” Heyns explains. “My main character would be a literary agent whose client’s novel is dished by a hostile review. The agent devises a convoluted revenge, which backfires badly.”

It is a theme many writers would feast on. But his agent persuaded him to go in a different direction. The result is a quiet and philosophical tale that celebrates art as much as it criticises how we critique it.

The tale starts with two South Africans meeting in London. Terence, a white man living in the city, is a university lecturer with no intention of ever going back. Natasha, a mixed-race woman from the Karoo, is visiting as her debut novel is the favourite to win a prestigious British literary prize.

Natasha’s book is a reimagining of Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm, told from the point of view of a black woman barely featured in the original. It is a work that sounds so fascinating, it is dismaying that it does not exist outside Heyns’s fictional world.

Just before the award is presented, a literary critic publicly accuses Natasha of appropriation and plagiarism despite her doing neither. “I think full-blown plagiarism, for example, Maeterlinck’s theft of Eugene Marais’s The Soul of the White Ant,is contemptible,” Heyns says. “Cross-reference to another work, more properly and trendily called intertextuality, is enriching rather than impoverishing.”

Bolstering Heyns’s view, he has interwoven art throughout his novel that echoes and enriches the narrative — notably, Pero die Cosimo’s The Death of Procris, Schubert’s Winterreise, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry and biography.

Heyns imagines there will be three types of reader responses to the art: “Those who don’t care for or about ‘serious’ literature, who won’t gain much from the allusions but won’t, I hope, be put off by them; those who are not familiar with many of the allusions, but will be inspired to read more about and in them, and who will gain much by it; and those who will be familiar with the quoted texts, and will enjoy (or hate) my particular angle on them.”

As for Natasha, there is no noble knight to avenge the slander of her name. Instead, it sets off a chain reaction that ends in tragedy, leaving Terence reeling. Lost and alone, he befriends Andy, a homeless man, and his delightful dog Robbie. “In a world apparently without meaning or purpose, we all need a dog,” Heyns says.

But the friendship is not without its complications, including causing strain with his dear friend Simon. It also leaves Terence reflecting on his past relationships, not least that with a university mate named Gary and his (possibly) ex-girlfriend Jenny.

Desperate for a foundation, Terence turns to Hopkins.

“Hopkins, as a fervent Jesuit, was torn between his attraction to beauty, both natural and human, in particular male beauty, and his dedication to what he saw as a religious ideal of purity,” Heyns explains.

“Terence is neither religious nor gay, but he is drawn to the crisis of belief that he discerns in Hopkins’s work, because he is looking for something to believe in, in a world that seems to be intent on a collapse of values.”

To the last comment, Heyns’s novel provides no answers. Despite the graceful and sensitive prose and a fairy-tale moment for one character, the story is set in our modern age where violence and selfishness are no strangers. Perhaps all there is to do is follow the author’s advice and get a dog. I have two, and a cat.

I recommend, in addition to playing Winterreise in the background, you read Each Mortal Thing.

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