Jane Rosenthal
WAY UP WAY OUT by Harold Strachan (David Philip, R42,99)
It’s a strange practice this, of putting out a brand new novel, first print run of the first edition, with snippets of review-type comment already adorning the cover.
Way Up Way Out has been done in this way. And it’s not just any old folk whose comments are providing wings for this book – it’s Athol Fugard’s and Tom Lodge’s, no less. They think very highly of it, describing it as “shamelessly engaging” and “a classy piece of literature”.
And far be it from me to disagree with them. Way Up Way Out is a delightful read. Written in the first person as a chatty memoir, it begins when the narrator is five years old in Pietermaritzburg and seeking an opportunity to see the toes of the Indian veggie vendor.
He has been warned by his Aunt Aggie that he should never put money in his mouth as “Indians pick it up with their toes”. Of mixed ancestry, in the days when Afrikaners and the South African English were still two very separate nations, the narrator goes through his childhood trying to make sense of such popular wisdoms as the one about money.
He also feels constrained to test the promised consequences of “playing with one’s Person”, and deals pretty devastatingly with life at Wolseley College, where he survived by means of elaborate “political guile”. His extended family come in for several sideswipes, but he describes his mother affectionately as “an unruly woman”.
Though his social comment cuts quite a few barriers, there’s no whiff of any political explanation of the era, except to relate the Ossewabrandwag to the absence of conscription in World War II. This war provided Strachan’s narrator with a heaven-sent opportunity to become an “aviator” and fly an “aeroplane”. This aviation thing had been a passion since boyhood.
One of the best parts of the book describes an expedition to the Karkloof. The narrator and his pals set off with a packhorse to walk from Pietermaritzburg to the Karkloof to find the most ancient Zulu person who might remember the flight of an early South African glider in that area – a wonderful Boy’s Own adventure which he renders with tender nostalgia.
It is interesting to note that although this novel is subtitled A Satirical Novel, it becomes progressively more romantic as the story proceeds, the intensity only partly camouflaged by the witticisms.
Strachan can’t abide the pretentious, empty-headed jingoism of fading imperialism (often manifested in private schools and elsewhere), but he celebrates certain women, his male friendships, his female friendships, the “endless ancient bitter beautiful landscape of Africa” and, in a big way, flying. “Oh I have slipped the surly bonds of earth” and all that.
Clearly there are aspects of war that bother him. For example, he refers to the King’s Own Scottish Borderers as “as unlovely a crowd of death-merchants as you could possibly hope not to meet in a trench”.
But for him the war provided an opportunity to do something really interesting and become the best they could be. He and his pals of the Karkloof expedition end up at flying school together. It was an interesting time to come of age and they seized the day, so to speak. The novel concludes with the parade where they get their wings as though this were, in fact, enough to celebrate. And the war was another story.
Often hilarious, frequently outrageous (politically correct feminists be warned), it charts a corner of our experience and history that deserves to be remembered, warts and ambivalences notwithstanding.
Whether it is a memoir or a novel is interesting but irrelevant: it rings true.