Christina Patterson
MANLY PURSUITS by Ann Harries (Bloomsbury)
This novel, by a South African migre, comes garlanded with praise from Doris Lessing and JM Coetzee -deservedly.
Set in South Africa at the end of the last century, it features many of the leading thinkers and writers of their generation – Cecil Rhodes, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Dodgson, Olive Schreiner, Oscar Wilde. The narrator, Professor Francis Wills, is, according to Harries in her acknowledgements, “practically the only character in the book who exists only in my imagination”.
In the wake of a traumatic series of events in Oxford, which remain unrevealed till the end of the novel, Wills is summoned to South Africa by millionaire Cecil Rhodes, who believes he is dying and can only be saved by hearing British birdsong on the slopes of Table Mountain.
As instructed, Wills arrives with 200 songbirds – nightingales, chaffinches, blackbirds, robins and starlings – but experiences mounting anxiety as the day picked for their release looms and they remain stubbornly silent. In the opulent surroundings of Rhodes’s estate, he finds himself drawn into a major intrigue, where the stakes are war, and an encounter with a small child which is to change his life.
This hugely ambitious novel takes on an impressive range of themes, from history, colonialism and racism to science, evolution, sexual repression and betrayal. It is shot through with the audacity of the whole Victorian enterprise, the experiments conducted in fusty, wood-panelled Oxford rooms by upper-class Englishmen who fully expected to run the empire, if not the world. This audacity is reflected in Harries’s playful choice to bring together these movers and shakers in a single narrative.
Wills’s fussy, precise voice, full of circumlocutions and intricate sub-clauses, never falters, proving an excellent vehicle for a novel which manages to be both an entertaining read and an evocative portrait of an era.