Shaun de Waal=20
CHEAP LIVES by Antony Sher (Little, Brown, R79,99)=20
SOME years ago, as the first buds of a new South African=20 dispensation began to open, much ink was expended in=20 speculation about what new forms our literature would now=20 take. It was assumed that the exigencies that drove the=20 apartheid-era novels of such writers as Nadine Gordimer and=20 Andre Brink were about to vanish; a new freedom was=20 postulated for the imagination, new cross-cultural forms=20 were hazily envisaged.=20
Of course there is no firm line to be drawn between the=20 fiction of the old South Africa and that of the new; in=20 most instances, if one considers work published since 1990,=20 they look rather alike. There hasn’t — yet — been a=20 cultural renaissance to match the political rebirth. And it=20 would be invidious to judge work appearing now by the=20 standard of some unrealised future. =20
It is interesting, though, to look at a novel like Antony=20 Sher’s Cheap Lives in the light of the old/new South Africa=20 split. It invites such an examination, for one of its=20 themes is the moment of transition, and the corollary=20 issues of guilt and retribution. =20
Cheap Lives takes place at the beginnings of South Africa’s=20 great sea-change: it is set in 1989, on the cusp of=20 transformation. Yusuf, a coloured prisoner on death row,=20 sentenced to hang for murder, begins to receive letters=20 from “the one that got away” — Adrian, a white man who=20 picked him up in Cape Town’s Gardens and took him to bed,=20 who could have been his next victim, but was left=20 physically unharmed.=20
How Adrian escaped death at Yusuf’s hands is the mystery=20 Sher sets up at once — and then cleverly delays answering=20 for most of the book. Adrian’s need to know exactly what=20 happened on that night, and why he was “spared”, drives his=20 desire to communicate with Yusuf, and from this grows a=20 two-sided exploration of their separate but linked selves.=20
The story — Yusuf’s life, Adrian’s recent career as a=20 tour-guide — unfolds through their intertwined missives.=20 This is a real epistolary novel: the letters do not just=20 recount anterior events, but themselves form part of the=20 narrative. Sher takes care to give his narrators different=20 voices (Yusuf’s is brutal and staccato, Adrian’s is=20 chattily luxuriant, even camp), deftly exploiting this=20 tension of tone, playing off against one another the=20 opposing but symbiotic halves of the tale.=20
On a symbolic (or not so symbolic) level, Sher takes the=20 juxtaposition further, giving the correspondents utterly=20 different appearances to coincide with their tragically=20 different backgrounds. Yusuf is small and has a jutting=20 brow that he himself describes as like that of an=20 “Aborigine”, while Adrian is a vision of Waspy beauty,=20 tanned and blond, attractive to the point of self-doubt.=20 Yusuf is bestial, Adrian is angelic.=20
So far, the reader might be getting the uncomfortable=20 feeling that age-old racial stereotypes are being employed,=20 and that the beast/angel dichotomy Sher invokes went out=20 with Aldous Huxley. But Sher, as his excellent previous=20 novel, The Indoor Boy, showed, prefers the ambiguous to the=20 straightforward, and he complicates and undermines the very=20 oppositions he sets up. =20
One’s sympathies fluctuate: Yusuf’s harsh voice begins to=20 win one over; Adrian’s ironic tour-guide patter becomes=20 less amusing. The roles of aggressor and victim blur into=20 each other; the two men become “blood brothers”, linked by=20 their shadowy encounter and by the words they exchange. =20
If this is Sher’s transposition of a South African history=20 and contemporary reality into the personal pathologies of=20 his characters, then it works very well — Cheap Lives is a=20 gripping, engagingly fluent novel.=20
There lingers, though, a sense that beneath the ambivalence=20 with which Sher treats his characters lies a kind of=20 loathing, the feeling that finally they are both equally=20 condemned — and deserve to be condemned.=20
Whether or not it is the result of reading the novel=20 against South Africa’s over-arching historical narrative,=20 Cheap Lives seems to present itself as a parable and Yusuf=20 and Adrian as somehow emblematic. Sher deals with the=20 incipient transformation of our society, but his=20 characters, in the end, appear unchanged — for all the=20 masks they have worn and shed. Sher has, in the course of=20 his narrative manipulations, held out the promise of=20 redemption, the hope that the beast and the angel (in us=20 all?) can be reconciled. And then he denies them, and us,=20 such reconciliaton.=20
It is probably inappropriate to object to a novelist’s=20 pessimism or to the fact that a novel leaves one deflated.=20 And it would be silly to expect all our fiction to reflect=20 an upbeat national mood. Yet Cheap Lives is a deliberate=20 refraction of a larger historical drama — one in which we=20 are all implicated. We are characters in a real story, and=20 we want, perhaps misguidedly, a happy ending. We need, at=20 least, to believe we could imagine one.=20