Killer Country
by Mike Nicol (Umuzi Books)
Could crime fiction be the new direction the “political novel” is taking in contemporary South Africa? If that is so, what does this say about our self-perception as a nation? And, if I am right, what does this brilliant but incredibly bleak new work by Mike Nicol say about where we are going?
The second in Nicol’s Revenge Trilogy (the first was the acclaimed Payback), the plot revolves around the imminent release of a gangster, Obed Chocho, that provokes Judge Telman Visser — who had sentenced him — to seek protection from Cape Town-based personal security experts Mace Bishop and Pylon Buse. He also wants them to look into security for his father, who lives on an isolated farm: whether from fear of a revenge attack or concern at the commonplace attacks on farmers happening in the country, he fears his father is at risk. The problem: the old man does not seem to want protection.
From prison, Chocho hires a hitman to kill a man who has been having an affair with his wife. But things don’t turn out well and both wife and boyfriend are murdered. The intention — to warn his wife to behave herself — has apparently backfired.
Meanwhile, Bishop is further entangled with a crooked German businessman, Wolfgang Schneider, who needs protection during his visit to South Africa to close a (clearly) shady BEE-related property development deal. Even before Schultz arrives in South Africa, Bishop — in Germany to see his client — witnesses the ruthlessness of Schultz’s organisation.
But things start to fall apart very quickly. En route from Cape Town International Airport to town, Schultz is shot by a sniper (in fact, the same hitman who killed Chocho’s wife and her boyfriend). As Bishop and Buse investigate they start to see connections between the various cases that involve them. Connecting everything is a lawyer.
The lawyer that has helped obtain Chocho’s release (and helped a bit in resolving his marital disputes), Sheemina February, has herself an axe to grind with Bishop and Buse, whom she had encountered all too painfully during their past lives in Umkhonto weSizwe.
Nicol’s vision of the new South Africa is grim: business and crime, progressive politics and murder, are connected. The law and justice itself are malleable. Everyone is ruthless — even our heroes display a penchant for torture. There is an uncomfortable dualism in their partnership and that of the hitmen Spitz and Manga. The ghosts of the violent past haunt the present, surfacing all too frequently. Even normal life is disturbed by random acts of violence. No one is immune from threat.
What drives this story perhaps more than plot and character is the power of Nicol’s writing. Sparse and matter-of-fact, it is often compared in this respect (and the bleakness of his vision, I would add) with the great United States novelist Cormac McCarthy. I certainly saw in Nicol’s novel echoes of McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men, without the utterly chilling figure of that novel’s central villain. Nicol’s characters, even the really bad ones, all have softer edges — with the exception perhaps of February.
A recurring motif in the story is that of country music — a hard-edged genre that deals often with lost love, rough justice and an often lonely rugged individualism. That the characters share a taste for this kind of music perhaps signifies their own kind of individualism.
It makes for great if deeply unsettling reading. The shock ending points towards the third novel in the trilogy, one in which convention demands that everything will be resolved. But I wonder whether Nicol will surprise us by breaking with the convention. The vision of South Africa in this story — bleak, brutal and corrupt — is one that would seemingly defy a “happy” resolution.