Chris Dunton
THESE THINGS HAPPEN by Shaun de Waal
(Ad Donker, R59,95)
AT over 200 pages, this is a generous collection a dozen stories, one of them, “Dave”, a wonderfully sustained piece, taking up a quarter of the book. All but four of the stories are on gay life, one way or another even so, the collection never settles into sameness. In his debut collection, Mail & Guardian literary editor Shaun de Waal seems deliberately to foreground the range of his work, its variety.
Of the stories that don’t touch on gay life, one, The Priest’s Story, is set, more-or- less, in Mozambique in the years of the civil war. De Waal’s skill here is in coming so close to Graham Greeneland and yet creating a story that isn’t derivative. At the centre, certainly, is a crisis of conscience as, thrown into a role as vital liaison in the peace process, a priest must contemplate carrying out a just killing.
Another story (But Isn’t He Dead?) deals with the lives of a jazz pianist and African National Congress exiles in London. Red Rover covers the crisis of a party veteran leading his comrades out of a stadium demonstration to be mown down by bantustan troops. Though no location is specified, the publication of this story now has fresh relevance as the debate simmers over the provenance of the marching orders that ended in the Bisho massacre.
In the book’s opening story, Jacaranda Street, De Waal depicts a young boy’s fascination with a reclusive elderly man the narrator’s assumption of the boy’s consciousness is entirely convincing, steeped in private logic, apparently inconsequential, always veering off at tangents.
The title story is about splitting up. Like those of other stories here, its structure is alive, not just a scheme but built to lead step by unpredictable step into a solid sense of the weight and complexity of a dilemma. As the book’s blurb puts it, these are stories that “deal with people at turning points in their lives, or at moments when the truth becomes unavoidable”.
Struggles to touch the truth are the subject of X and I the story that (intentionally, I guess) ends the book at its deepest level of disquiet. It is a piece of “faction” (or documentary such a question is part of its theme) on the author’s encounters with the late Afrikaans short story writer Koos Prinsloo.
The biggest success is perhaps the least expected, the long story “Dave”. Here is the diary of a middle-aged gay man infatuated with a male model (or prostitute, or someone just like him doubt on which the story pivots). What could have been a hackneyed piece is, as it turns out, tense, poignant and funny, owing to De Waal’s complete success in capturing the diarist’s voice, obsessed with “Dave”, confiding to the page, wittering on, a little brave and more than a little naff.
“Wish me luck,” he instructs his diary as he goes to meet “Dave”, and we do: there’s something of a triumph here in a story that gives so much fun and that generates so much empathy for its narrator.