Ivor Powell
THE MIRROR by Lynn Freed (Flamingo)
Reading South African-born novelist Lynn Freed’s new book, The Mirror, led this reviewer inexorably to a single overwhelming question. And that question is: So what?
A fictional autobiography, The Mirror has as its heroine a young Englishwoman called Agnes la Grange. When the book opens, around the beginning of the 1920s, Agnes has recently arrived in Durban to work as a housemaid (and, though this is probably not part of the official contract, part-time concubine) in a Jewish household after an orphaned childhood in England.
Our Agnes – who in the early part of the novel bears a passing resemblance to Moll Flanders – is both resourceful and ambitious, however, and she succeeds in transcending such unpromising beginnings and reinventing herself again and again. She turns an unwanted pregnancy to her financial advantage. She buys first a small hotel, then a somewhat larger one, and gradually, as she overcomes setbacks and reverses, establishes herself as a lady of substance in or at least on the fringes of Durban society.
Meanwhile, with her own destiny crisscrossing that of the Jewish family she came out to serve, she has various affairs; she enters into various partnerships (alternately well- and ill- advised); she kind of brings up a daughter; she extricates herself from a deadening marriage; she nurtures the odd resentment and schemes the odd scheme; she does a bit of this and a bit of that – and then nearly 200 pages later, the book is finally, mercifully, but somewhat bewilderingly, over.
No doubt Freed was deliberate in the low-key, almost diaristic style in which the novel is cast, as much as in the deadpan, almost documentary way in which the narrative piles up. It’s meant to be the kind of unsentimentalised story that tells itself and makes its own quasifeminist points about the survival of the soul and the hypocrisies of society.
All well and good. The problem is that that such devices only work when the narrative engages and when the character being explored is one we are led to care about. In this case it doesn’t and I didn’t. There were no real truths or epiphanies to be gleaned from the experiences of the heroine.
Perhaps the curiously disengaging quality of the book is best indicated by pointing to the fact that the novel traces some 50 years or so of South African history without registering or resisting or even commenting upon the broader patterns of that history at all. Towards the end of the book Agnes is entrusted with a coloured boy by the man who comes closest, in the story, to the love of her life. Unsentimentally as ever, she puts him to work with a bucket and broom in her hotel.
It’s a true and believable response by a white South African, no question about that. But the way it is told is without any sense of irony or distance. Without wanting to say that every book about South Africa has to embrace a political theme, there is a real problem here: Freed succeeds in entering into the cramped and crimped experience of her protagonist, without succeeding in illuminating it at all.