Books: Across the universe

27 July 2014 - 02:04 By Bron Sibree
subscribe Just R20 for the first month. Support independent journalism by subscribing to our digital news package.
Subscribe now

It doesn't matter where on the planet Tim Winton's readers are, he knows how to reach them with his stories. By Bron Sibree

Eyrie ****

Tim Winton (Picador, R250)

It's a fact not lost on Tim Winton, one of Australia's most esteemed authors, that interest in his fiction has been building in SA for some years. He marvels at his ever-burgeoning international readership and takes particular delight in the letters he receives from South Africa.

"It interests me that in South Africa and Australia, our major cities are beleaguered by what some would see as an austere environment, but also beleaguered by the past. In Australia, we had our reformation in the '70s, and are now living through a determined counter-reformation politically and culturally, and it's interesting to see that playing out in a different way in SA. You do feel in both cultures a sense of curdling of hopes and expectations. Lots of people with goodwill, lots of people of good heart having their hopes dashed."

Indeed, Winton so masterfully inhabits the character of a man of goodwill whose hopes have curdled in his latest and ninth novel, Eyrie, that the book has been hailed from London to Los Angeles, from Texas to Toronto, for the way it speaks to the tide of inequality gripping the developed world.

Set in the port city of Fremantle in Western Australia, where Winton lives, it views the resource-rich state of Western Australia and its determined rush towards wealth at all costs through the dyspeptic eyes of one Tom Keely, a middle-aged, unemployed, publicly-disgraced environmental activist.

Once something of a celebrity, Keely is now divorced, disillusioned and holed up in the eyrie of the novel's title, a seedy top-floor apartment in a grim high-rise block for the down-at-heel. He's fallen so low he's beyond caring - until, after a chance encounter with his neighbours, a woman from his past and her introverted young son, something shifts within him.

What follows is one of Winton's most poetic, politically-charged and page-turning novels to date. All the familiar themes of his oeuvre - more than 25 works, be they non-fiction, fiction, plays or story collections - are reprised here: the nature of redemption, the quality of mercy, the hazards and joys of family, the preoccupation with landscape, and deep environmental concerns.

Anchored in the early days of the global financial crisis and laced with a wry, dark humour, Eyrie speaks so potently to the prevailing zeitgeist that certain passages of its spectacular opening chapter, which sees Keely nursing a hangover, peering over the skyline and reflecting on the "booming state of Western Australia", have become inscribed into Australia's national consciousness: the country is "China's swaggering enabler ... Leviathan with an irritable bowel".

Some reviewers have called Keely a more haunted version of the 53-year-old author, but Winton is quick to correct this. "Tom Keely is not me, and his views aren't mine, but there is a bit of overlap. It was interesting and painful to inhabit someone who's so disenchanted. He embodies those for whom all hopes and dreams are shrivelling and, in retrospect, some of the responses to the book in Australia were about the fact that it spoke in some way for those who, rightly or wrongly, feel there's not as many avenues for progressive thinking as there once were."

In many ways Eyrie asks how we might respond to those who fall outside the circle of family, or tribe, or to those who fall through the cracks opened by a resource-based economy. "Like South Africa, ours is an economy of winners and losers," says Winton. "It's a curious development that in the last decade or two we went from talking about and imagining ourselves as a culture to slipping, either by default or political design in the wake of the Reagan-Thatcher era, into thinking of ourselves primarily as an economy. And that's blunted our imaginations and our sense not just of ourselves but our ability to imagine the plight of others."

Imagination is a recurring theme in conversation with Winton, who sees it as being that "which unites us as people". Of his preternatural ability to convey a landscape's bounty, power and beauty, he says: "I was unthinkingly engaged and enchanted and intrigued by the natural world long before I had a language for it. Nature is always leaning in, even in an urban setting like the port city in Eyrie. And I think that's the Australian experience, whether people realise it or not. Regardless of how urban we are, we're surrounded by landscape in a way that perhaps only Africans would understand."

For Winton, the particularity of place "imprints itself on you whether you realise it or not. Sometimes you don't feel or see the marks until later. Writing a novel for me is like sitting myself down in front of a salt pan and staring long enough until a figure emerges from the other side, rather like something out of a bad Western. You just attend to a place and the place determines the logic of those characters."

Having attended to a very specific place for more than three decades, Winton still finds it "remarkable" that his books are so widely read. "You think: 'How can this be?' Yet, on another level, why shouldn't somebody from the West Coast of Australia be read in Paris or London or Joburg? I read Damon Galgut and Bernard MacLaverty and writers from everywhere. I think we underestimate the sort of liquid capacity of literature to find its way to strangers. I think it's one of the great miracles of culture that we paint pictures, tell stories, write poems and set them to the winds and they land in places that we've never been." - @BronSibree

Cobra ****

Deon Meyer (Hodder & Stoughton, R285)

Three down in Franschhoek, blood and brains all over the guesthouse walls. The shooter has left a calling card: bullet casings engraved with a spitting cobra. There's a fourth guest missing, and he was using a false passport.

Standing at the scene is Benny Griessel, 422 days sober and a shambles. Dressed in yesterday's clothes, he's mired in self-loathing, lying to his colleagues and his AA sponsor, and avoiding his lover Alexa. Moving in with her was a mistake. She's bought him winter pyjamas which make him feel like a baboon in fancy dress. He's mortified. "What was wrong with an old pair of tracksuit pants and a T-shirt?"

Worse, she calls his, ahem, "member" his "rascal". Arme Benna, the ignominy of it.

But Griessel's got other things on his mind now, as the murders ignite an international row. Interpol's onto it, so is Britain's MI6 and before long South Africa's own shadowy State Security Agency is tramping all over the case. Who was the missing guest, and what did he have that they need?

The plot clicks along like a machine, more cinematic than usual - a result perhaps of Meyer's new interest in film and directing. The set pieces, such as a complex train-hopping action sequence, are slickly executed. This is an author in full charge of his technique, but he burnishes the mechanics of the story with delicious Kaapse characters and richly idiomatic dialogue, referencing Jack Parow and Woolies food, auntys and outjies and fokken shit, pappie. The feral pickpocket Tyrone Kleinbooi is one of Meyer's best characters, sly and quick with a strong sense of thieves' honour.

Meyer has a habit of beckoning side characters to the front of stage in subsequent books. Griessel himself started out as a walk-on part; now he's trumpeted on the cover.

Here's hoping Meyer will put Mbali Kaleni centre stage in future: the awkward captain with her KFC snacks and her secret stashes of chips and chocolate. The quietly competent Kaleni is the moral centre of the team, hiding her vulnerability behind a crust of strictness, knowing she cannot show weakness. More of Mbali, please, and much more of Meyer.

- Michele Magwood @michelemagwood

Book Bites

Dear Bullet - Or a Letter to my Shooter ***

Sixolile Mbalo (Jonathan Ball Publishers, R145)

Sixolile Mbalo was 13 years old when a young man arrived in her village and began to abuse her - ultimately leaving her for dead in a pit. She clawed out of it and crawled 300m for help.

This biography is her therapy session; it is also the face of what happens to our young girls each and every day, made to serve life sentences in the prisons of their minds, victims of bullets and knives. Dear Bullet is not a cry for help, it is a wail. - Kgebetli Moele

The Side of the Sun at Noon ****

Hazel Crampton (Jacana, R280)

A sumptuous, entirely engaging quest narrative that opens at the Cape of Good Hope in the mid-17th century, revealing the complex dynamics of the Dutch settlers' interactions with the Khoikhoi - particularly the relationship between Jan van Riebeeck and the young Eva.

The Dutch set off to reach the fabled Chobona people, believed by the men from the Netherlands to stem from Monomotapa, the rich and gold-bearing southern empire that traded with the Portuguese.

What emerges is a piercing inquest into the fraught relationships of colonial times. - Jonathan Amid @Amidouterkeys

Animals ****

Emma Jane Unsworth (Canongate, R265)

It's Manchester, some time just before the London Summer Olympics, and Laura and her best pal/housemate Tyler love the nightlife, love to boogie - and love to take drugs and drink until they reach oblivion. They're just a couple of girls, innit, having fun.

But their friendship is being tested: Laura is now engaged to recent teetotaller Jim, a serious man, concert pianist and a bit of a prick, who wants her to stop her wild ways. Unsworth's second novel is a frenetic, filthy account of chicks behaving badly. As Caitlin Moran blurbs, it's "Withnail with girls". - Jennifer Platt @Jenniferdplatt

Notes from The Good Book Appreciation Society

The War At Home: Women and Families in the Anglo-Boer War

Albert Grundlingh and Bill Nasson (Tafelberg, R350)

Sue Soal Not only is it co-edited by the awesome Bill Nasson. Not only does it have an essay by the awesome Helen Bradford. It also has photographs that make everything else stop.

Mack Lundy The description hooked me, particularly since it also looks at civilians in the black camps.

Helen Moffett I am trying to figure out what genre they're going for. Academic? Glossy photographic record? Both?

Danny Wimpey I remember an old lady who was born in a concentration camp taking a spoonful of a lemon pudding I had made and refusing to eat any more saying, "Engelse smaak" ["tastes English"].

  • Join the GBAS for great conversation and the chance to win local books. Write to books@sundaytimes.co.za

Book Blog

Crazy Author Moment at the Hay Festival, by Niq Mhlongo

In the morning at about 9 we are at the Green Room again for our breakfast. Bra Zakes Mda is wearing his cowboy hat. I'm facing the door. I see Ben Okri approaching our table, his trademark cap on his head.

Bra Zakes puts his fork down on the plate without eating the scrambled egg. Okri extends his right hand. "Hi, my name is Ben," he is smiling. "I just want to say thank you for the music last night. It was a great evening, and I really enjoyed it."

Confused, my eyes are darting from Okri to Bra Zakes. Bra Zakes does not look confused at all. He is shaking Ben's hand.

"Thank you very much," Bra Zakes says.

I'm watching Bra Zakes as Okri is leaving our table, but he continues eating his breakfast as if nothing happened.

"And then what was that about?" I'm asking him. "You are not a musician."

"Niq, I presented with Ben Okri at several literary festivals around the world. He should know who I am by now. If he thinks I'm a musician that is fine with me."

"So he is mistaking you for the Buena Vista Social Club lead singer?"

"Yes."

"Oh my God! One day I will write about this day," I promise.

  • Mhlongo's latest novel is Way Back Home (Kwela, R195)

http://niqmhlongo.bookslive.co.za/blog/

subscribe Just R20 for the first month. Support independent journalism by subscribing to our digital news package.
Subscribe now