Books
I had a baboon in Africa
by Elizabeth Alley
WHITE LIGHTNING, by Justin Cartwright (Hodder Moa Beckett, $24. 99).
JUSTIN CARTWRIGHT’S JOURNEY FROM soft-porn film-maker to “one of the finest novelists currently at work”, as D J Taylor called him, requires a leap of faith probably resisted by his initial audience for Suzi Crispin, Night Nurse. South African-born Cartwright has lived in England for many years and White Lightning is his seventh novel. For a reviewer for whom he is a recent discovery, that is excellent news.
It would be easy to dismiss the book as another cathartic novel about middle-aged angst, exile and redemption, as the protagonist returns to his South African homeland to accompany his dying mother as she plays out the last stage of “the thin-spun thread of life”. It’s an artifice that enables the writer to reflect on some of the reference points of his birthplace, and to interpret the semaphores of time and place offered by its landscape.
Cartwright is good at landscape. Not in the conventional sense of images of clouds and mountains. The particularities of place are far less significant than the smaller images within it, the “makeshift tin roof flecked and faded red, the precise colour and texture of certain sea anemones”, or “the arum lilies, avatars of perfection … with veins on them like a man’s penis, perhaps a warning of their dulplicitousness”.
The narrator, James Kronk, meditates on ageing and death, on politics, race, the nature of good and evil, and especially about the illusions we all have about ourselves. He hungers for a goodness that continually eludes him. His conversations are often internalised as he reflects on his failed marriage and career, and the tragic, guilt-ridden death of his small son.
At the farm he buys to carve his own niche of South African paradise, Kronk becomes involved in two relationships. One is a predictable and unfulfilling entanglement with a South African woman. The second, far more intense, rewarding and complicated, is with an aged primate, a caged prisoner that goes with the farm:
Piet the baboon, provides the novel with both tenderness and tragedy.
There are also many moments of real, laugh-out-loud humour. His recollections of the soft-porn film industry, and his commentary on the middle-class English village life vigorously embraced by his former wife (“the locals with their thread-worm cheeks”) are funny, witty and penetratingly sharp. He’s an acute observer of contemporary life.
Ultimately, Kronk sees that there is no simple life, that single moments of happiness are more likely than the elusive life of self-fulfillment. Writing of uncommon beauty makes White Lightning an exceptional novel, authentic and original.
