The latest novel I’ve just finished is the South African “Double
Negative” by Ivan Vladislavic, published by And Other Stories.
And Other Stories, independent publishing in Britain, where
your yearly subscription assists them in bringing fringe novels to our
attention, their values being “Collaborative, imaginative and ‘shamelessly
literary’”. I have reviewed five of their works here before and if you’re
interested in assisting them with getting new works into print please visit
their website at http://www.andotherstories.org/
for details of their subscription packages.
Our protagonist in Neville Lister a university drop out, who
has returned to live in his parents home, working meaningless jobs (painting the
signs or roads or car parks). A family friend , the famed photographer Saul
Auerbach, agrees to take Neville on a tour for a day , and they team up with a
journalist seeking out a story and associated images in the pre Apartheid era
of South Africa. From a hill they choose three homes and agree to visit them
and find out the stories within. As it transpires the light fades and they only
get to two of the houses, with Neville’s being abandoned. We then move to the
period of South Africa’s change (whilst Neville is dodging military service in
London) and find that our story teller is now a small time photographer longing
to return to his homelands.
There were hours of calm
pleasure, when Jaco went off to buy paint or do his banking, or more secretive
duties in the service of the state that he hinted at too broadly and left me
behind in some parking lot to join the dots. Working alone, in silence, I
sometimes thought I was achieving something after all. In my jackson-pollocked
overalls – I had to stop Paulina from washing the history out of them – in a
clearing among the cars defined by four red witch’s hats, I was a solitary
actor on a stage: a white boy playing a black man. In a small way, I was a spectacle.
Yet I felt invisible. I savoured the veil that fell between my sweaty self and
the perfumed women sliding in and out of their cars. I flitted across the
lenses of their dark glassed like a spy.
In this section of the novel Neville manages to go back to
the home they missed that day, as the fame of Saul and exhibitions that include
the two photos Saul took in the other homes come to the fore. Of course the
past of South Africa and how it was before the change of power is always
niggling at Neville, this period of transition is an era where he doesn’t quite
feel at home anymore.
The end of apartheid put my nose
out of joint, I must confess. Suddenly the South Africans were talking to one
another. They wouldn’t shut up. Every so often one of them would wave a fist or
shout a slogan, but it did not stem the flow. The world looked on amazed that
these former adversaries had come together to talk the future into a different
shape. After a decade of wilfully excluding myself, I felt left out of the
club.
We then move to the post-apartheid era with Neville now a
semi successful photographer, with his own works exhibited, photographs of walls
and letterboxes. The majority of the last section of the novel being taken up with
Neville being interviewed by a young digital age blogger, writer, photographer
who has no idea of the past.
It was no longer possible to
imagine a different future, let alone a better one. Tomorrow always looked like
a recycled version of yesterday. It was already familiar.
Outside of our linear story we have the “Double Negative”
coming to the fore, two negatives make a positive right? The concept of
photography, the first section black, the middle section grey, the last section
white but the power is in reverse with whites with the control in section one
and blacks in section three, whilst the middle is blurry, muddled and confused,
a stage of transition.
The introduction points out the heavy use of metaphor
throughout and I must admit it was a way too liberal dose for my liking with
just about every paragraph containing some kind of metaphor. Some were
wonderful, others just distracting and although the whole structure, the
characters and the references could be read as a metaphor for South Africa
moving through transition it became a little to laboured like an overloaded
donkey traversing a rocky mountain path.
Overall a nice study of a country and the moving powers, the
uncertainty of the inhabitants and loss of a homeland. It didn’t matter that I
hadn’t read it prior to my “best of” list for the year, it wouldn’t have made
the top 10.
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