/ 4 August 2006

From both sides of the track

Fall of the Leaf

by PC Feller

Wide Boy

by Montague Bentley

(30 Degrees South)

Whereas autobiography grounds itself in verifiable facts, writers of a memoir have a lot more leeway. By admitting from the outset that they’ll be writing a purely subjective account, they can get away with a more imaginative representation. And here are two highly imaginative new memoirs by a new publisher.

Both of these writers are protected by pseudonyms, and they are evidently both old-timers reminiscing over long lives lived; but that is where the similarities between them end. One is a sensitive, well-educated soul; whereas the other seems to have made his way in the world by means of a more brutal ingenuity.

Fall of the Leaf revolves around the lifetimes of three school friends who are to meet up again for a reunion. The book punts itself as being a book ‘about the new and the old South Africa”, but it is mostly about the traumas of the ‘old”, and the disappointments of the ‘new”. The ‘PC Feller” who wrote the book is probably an academic. This is not only because he has called on two professors of English to grace his cover with their praises, but also because of his rich use of literary references throughout the book. He quotes liberally from Shakespeare and the rest of the English canon and provides interesting information on aspects of pharmacology, biology, psychology and history.

The book tries, perhaps, to be all encompassing, in that it tries to speak for the Greek, Jewish, Afrikaans and English communities, while also touching on those of the Zulu and Xhosa; so the text can come across as a bit cluttered. An attempt is made at a form of experimental writing — a slipstream of different voices, thoughts and dialogues frequently moves backwards and forwards in time and are represented by different stylistic features — and yet, it’s a rather stodgy sort of experimentalism. Despite a variety of zones, the sentiments expressed ultimately emerge from a rather orthodox English colonialism.

It is certainly not bad writing, but perhaps there are just too many schoolboy analogies and fond memories of favourite teachers. I was reminded of Dennis Hopper’s line in the movie Search and Destroy that ‘just because it happened to you, doesn’t make it interesting”. So, in a sense, these stories are rather mundane. Sure, there is love, sex, death, crime and so on; but the stories are reported, rather than re-lived.

Of more interest is the gangster’s tale, Wide Boy, written under the outlandish name of ‘Montague Bentley”. Although it’s labelled as ‘the tru-ish story of a Jo’burg spiv”, most of the action takes place in Zimbabwe. Following on the heels of Acid Alex, this is another story of someone who just doesn’t learn from his mistakes. The protagonist is an unrepentant opportunist and thief and is possibly the most fiendish individual to have put pen to paper since Jean Genet. He is proud of his amorality and boasts about ‘what a shit” he is when, for example, he makes money out of both sides of the Rhodesian war.

At first I thought Bentley might turn out to be another Boetie Dugmore, whose Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost (1969) set the standards for creative criminal expression in South Africa. Dugmore was also a raconteur, but he had humour and heart. Bentley, on the other hand, is too self centred, only wants cash and his attempts at revelations of tenderness are usually undercut by a callous ruthlessness. He is an unashamed opportunist, and possibly quite dangerous. In fact, I’d be wary of being too critical about this book because Bentley seems like a sensitive kind of guy — the kind whose sensitivity might force him to drop one in the Vaal dam in concrete underpants.

Fall of the Leaf and Wide Boy create interesting parallels of different classes of white experience — highbrow and low; the life of the mind and the life of the belly. PC Feller wanders about in happy clouds of abstraction, whereas Bentley shoots from the hip. Though Bentley seems a detestable sort, he does come across as being a good deal more interesting than Feller.

30 Degrees South (www.30degrees south.co.za) launched its new publishing house in September last year and is committed to South African stories. Although I felt that the editing might have been more rigorous (particularly on Fall of the Leaf), on the other hand it is also refreshing to allow authors their own idiosyncratic voices, instead of trying to gloss narratives into a single, easily digestible, market-related formula. So I think that the fact that these disparate voices have been introduced to the market is a good thing, and I could not agree with Alison Lowry’s warning at the Cape Town Book Fair recently that ‘too many mediocre books” are being published and that standards need to be raised. We need as many strange voices as we can find. Why not allow a thousand flowers to bloom?