Ken Barris THE IBIS TAPESTRY by Mike Nicol (Knopf)
The cover blurb describes The Ibis Tapestry as “a thriller with all the searing immediacy of today’s headlines”. An understandable bit of commercial fantasy perhaps, but wildly inaccurate, and unjust to a book that should be taken seriously on its own terms: as a referential maze more closely resembling hypertext search than that most sequential of genres, the thriller. Moreover, the plot is scantily developed, and the timing of the action is retarded far beyond any possibility of suspense, no doubt deliberately.
The novel revolves around the life and death of Christo Mercer, a gun-runner with literary aspirations. The principal narrator is Robert Poley, a writer of “airport thrillers” who inexplicably receives a laptop computer containing material written by Mercer. And so the chase is on.
But what kind of chase? The thriller device – the conceit that this is a thriller at all – raises an interesting question of its own. Mike Nicol has placed his novel on that uncomfortable divide between political writing and escapist fiction. It soon becomes clear, however, that broad political disclosure enjoys a much higher priority than disclosure of the limited violent event that explains everything else in thriller language. If this is a thriller, the chase is pure wild goose. Yet, if this is an updated glass (and ivory and horn and clay) bead game marked by loops, shameless loose ends and open ends, then the real suspense shifts to a different problem: will the novel actually reach any resolution? (I won’t tell.)
Enjoyable reading depends in part on being absorbed in the flow of narrative. I felt jarred by the constant digressions, such as Poley’s research notes, Professor Khafulo’s literary commentary on the unfolding text itself, and the disembodied voices of Poley’s live sources in the form of Mercer’s friends and associates. The research notes slowly build a picture of Mercer’s activities, and sketches the social and political background.
Yet Nicol’s willingness to go into detail about entirely marginal personalities, and the prosaic factual nature of these jottings (including dictionary definitions and glosses on news events referred to), clutter the book with unsurprising political information. The learned professor’s commentaries on the nature of the text within the text, or on magical realism, or on the effects of cultural colonialism, present a different kind of difficulty. He generates a surfeit of discursive intellectual material, the kind of thing writers used to imply and on which scholars outside the text expatiated. (Let me add that some of this material is trenchant and worth contemplating.) And the interview voices – sans face, sans gesture, sans quotation marks in some cases – create a detached interest at best, rather than unselfconscious absorption. These observations reflect my prejudices; however, I found myself yearning to get beyond the digressions to the more direct (and interesting) fictions that I hoped might largely constitute the book.
The form is defined by hypertext-like repetition-compulsions: windows opening on windows opening on windows. Nicol constructs Poley, Poley constructs Mercer, Mercer constructs Salma, and Salma constructs Sarra. Finally, Salma constructs the tapestry of an ibis that is a central trope of the book’s own construction.
All this literary-theoretical activity is possible because most of the characters who count are writers. Poley aside, the arms dealer Mercer is a poet and writes the Arabian Nights-style romance of Salma. Salma too is a narrator, relating her adventures with Sarra and Ibn-el Tamaru. And even the ibis that figures in her tapestry becomes a kind of author. Sarra’s words: “In my country we believed that the ibis hatched the world and named it. She made letters from the shapes of mountains, the contortions of trees, the sloughed skins of snakes, from the tracks beetles left over the sand. She made words from the sounds on the wind. These she sprinkled about the earth as she flew and they named the places where they fell …”
This bald exposition of the structure does not do justice to the quality of the prose – which is unpretentious and supple, and often catches one with moments of beauty – but it does suggest that Nicol intends his book to be viewed as a tapestry rather than a novel, at least in any narrowly defined sense. One could take the view, quite legitimately, that this is an ingenious case of art imitating the Internet. But there is a price to pay for relentless ingenuity, and for intellectual overlay on such a scale: it is difficult to work up any kind of identification with persons when there is so much construction going on.
If I could attempt to place a value on the tapestry, I would say that it is richly and intelligently woven, bearing the disintegrating life of the prime narrator Poley, his transformed but broken society, and a range of cultural, political and (urban) mythic readings that currently perplex this society as it manifests itself outside the novel.
Some of these readings are worn-out rehearsals of South African prejudices, tired political hatreds; others are deftly ministered, amusing and sharp. Together they build context for what could be the meat of the novel – the life and death, the thoughts, the imagination of Christo Mercer – but this context threatens to become the meat itself, at some cost to the presence of the subject.
Readers who are dependent on narrative convention might find aspects of The Ibis Tapestry tedious; readers with looser (and more contemporary) expectations might well admire its committed obliquity of attack, and find it an intriguing, enjoyable puzzle.
Ken Barris won the 1998 M-Net Book Prize in the English category for his novel The Jailer’s Book (Kagiso). His new novel, Evolution, will be published by Zebra next month