Ken Barris
RUDE SHELTERS by Robert Kirby (Jonathan Ball, R79,95)
RUDE SHELTERS is a collection of Robert Kirby’s columns and articles that, judging by the content, span a three-year period from 1994 to 1996. It includes selections of his work as a television critic for The Star Tonight, satirical columns in the Sunday Times and Financial Mail, and a few miscellaneous articles for various publications.
In his introduction, Peter Wilhelm warns against applying the label “satirist” to Kirby too easily. He also assures us that Kirby is no curmudgeon or misanthrope. I’m not sure why. Kirby is an exemplary satirist – he can be penetrating, cutting, fearless, favourless, downright cruel and screamingly funny. But if you scrape away the misanthropic wit, you will see that Kirby, like many satirists, is a passionate and sincere writer.
Part of Kirby’s power as a satirist comes precisely from a rich, abusive element, shown in phrases such as “some frightful, strident, self-lubricating feminist chainsaw calling itself Nina Romm”. This is a shade more personal than the relatively bland forthrightness with which he condemns Bryce Courtenay’s The Power of One: “Only an advertising man could write such utter shit.”
But there is a gentler, kinder Kirby who is moved by serious concerns. One of these is invasive journalism, reflected, for example, in his critique of the SABC’s Point Blank as it explores the trauma of a rape victim, whose “human dignity was meticulously violated for a second time”. One can add to this list of Kirby’s targets the use of children in advertising, ecological issues, the degradation of language by jargon- spouting bureaucrats, censorship, and the numbing effect of artistic and journalistic mediocrity.
The television criticism as a whole charts an important period of change in the life of the SABC television service: from being an inept, sycophantic state mouthpiece, through a brief transitional period of bewilderment, to being an inept, sycophantic state mouthpiece. I was impressed by Kirby’s ability to remember how things ought to be, given the comprehensiveness, the sheer massiveness, of what’s wrong. To me this is the heart of his satire: his analysis of media subtext measured against a subtle affirmation of liberal values.
I found Kirby most amusing (and rewarding) when he was most serious, and least amusing in his funny work, the Sunday Times and Financial Mail articles. The structures get to be heavily predictable – the exaggeration, the facetious names, the heavy-handed ironies – and a touch too broad for me. But that is a matter of taste, and in fairness to Kirby, articles of this kind shouldn’t be read one after the other over a few days. They weren’t written with that kind of consumption in mind.
The English Academy gave Kirby the 1996 Thomas Pringle Award. His entertaining, acute, counter-anaesthetic prose deserves such serious recognition.
Ken Barris is a winner of the Olive Schreiner and Ingrid Jonker prizes. His novel The Jailer’s Book is published by Kagiso