/ 23 October 1998

Traveller in an empty land

Ken Barris

THE LOSTNESS OF ALICE by John Conyngham (Ad Donker)

The Lostness of Alice, the third novel by KwaZulu-Natal author John Conyngham, is placed on the cusp of South Africa’s transition. FW de Klerk is still in power, negotiations are proceeding in fits and starts, and the pariah status of the country is only partly withdrawn. As the novel proceeds, the new South Africa begins to take on its current violent shape.

It is in this uncertain atmosphere that Alice Walker – beautiful, delicate and white – passes through her gate arched with roses, and disappears. Through letters in the press, diary entries and conversations, her absence is construed in various ways, depending on viewpoint, as loss of civilisation, of identity, certainly of innocence.

The question the book explores most centrally is the relationship of the speaker to Africa. The exploration itself is couched in terms of Africa firstly as a space, and secondly as a political environment. Yet it seems obvious that anyone wishing to explore his or her relationship with a continent would have to engage with its people. Conyngham’s narrator Chris manages not to do so. He doesn’t even try. In The Lostness of Alice, Africans are servants, faceless murderers and abductors, hustlers, or victims of white brutality. There are no black personalities of any significance or substance in the novel. I am not advocating affirmative action in the content of art, and I don’t question Conyngham’s right to write about whomever he wishes. Yet one must bear in mind the issues raised by the novel itself.

Where Africa is a political environment, the novel is most abstract and least interesting. Conyngham churns out the race relations pabulum one can read every day in the letter columns of any newspaper. He does maintain an appropriate neutrality, except in Chris’s worst-case fantasy of revolution and flight: white refugees head to the port city in armed convoys, seeking refuge in the British Consulate.

Here the characteristically jaundiced accounts of being white and dispossessed in Africa become the property of the narrator, who thus loses his disarming distance. He comes to share the bewilderment of his (deposed white middle) class, unable to understand or deal with change creatively, until forced to do so by a crisis of betrayal.

If Africa is primarily a space, the question posed for the narrator is whether or not he fits into it. Chris doesn’t know. He wonders about Europe and Africa, trying on each continent like a pair of shoes, and testing his sensations. He becomes an exile from himself, alienated in Europe but not at home in Africa. Like Alice, he is lost; and because he is lost, he becomes a writer.

The proposition seems to be that through the puzzling loss of his political innocence (read unconsciousness), he is forced to express his condition: “In other words, Alice, I am who I am because of you.” Through his writing, Chris comes to regard himself as found; but his “foundness” is curious, for his writing provides ample testimony that he has failed in his quest for the Other, so stupendously hidden by continental Africa.

It is a failure resident in his timidity as a writer. Alice disappears through the looking glass – yet her chronicler remains on this side of the mirror, feeling bad because he is unable to imagine what happens to her, or what she might become, in that inverted country.

Still, I enjoyed reading The Lostness of Alice. For all the self-indulgence of its characters, the tale is never irresolute. Conyngham’s prose is competent and understated, with restrained, rewarding forays into metaphor. He is an entertaining travel writer, and I found Chris’s journeys interesting in their own right, whatever their contribution to more important developments in the novel. This is a deftly told story, a pleasant read, but – given the importance Conyngham places on the lostness of Alice – it could be more inwardly adventurous.

Ken Barris won the 1998 M-Net Book Prize for his novel The Jailer’s Book (Kagiso). His new novel, Evolution, has just been published by Zebra