Jane Rosenthal
EMBRACE by Mark Behr (Little, Brown)
Mark Behr’s first novel, The Smell of Apples, was prescribed for schools and won the M-Net and CNA Awards more or less simultaneously with his revelation of his spying activities in the apartheid era. Or so it would seem in the popular memory.
His new novel, Embrace, may well annoy a lot of people. To begin with, in the dedication he gives thanks to his friends and family for “grace, moral imagination and trust”, and the first chapter is prefaced by a quote from JM Coetzee on the meaning of the word “embrace”. So at the outset he calls in the big guns on his side. Whether or not grace can be had from friends and family is a subject for another debate, but the reader is primed to see whether grace is to be found in this novel, the main theme of which is betrayal.
It relates the early adolescence of Karl de Man, a pupil at a choir school in the Drakensberg, but does not seek so much to celebrate and illuminate this period as to fling down a challenge to society and the establishment in general. Karl de Man is the only son of Afrikaans parents, Bok and Bokkie. Such true-blue boere were Bok’s family that they trekked on to Tanganyika after the Anglo-Boer South African War rather than live under the British.
After independence they returned to South Africa where Bok and the older De Mans worked as game-rangers, big-game hunters and purveyors of (fake) curios. So Karl’s early childhood was in the bush, close to nature which is celebrated in much lyrical prose. When times got too hard they moved to Amanzimtoti and other suburban settings. Cosseted by his older sisters, indulged and loved by his parents, Karl learns early that he is not allowed to dress up in girls’ clothes, should not show his wimpish terror of guns.
When his singing voice impresses a teacher he auditions for the choir school. He enters a world where his musical, social, intellectual and sexual education begins. Talented, beautiful and self-obsessed, arrogant and insecure, he goes through his three years at the school on the make. He craves approval from teachers and pupils. His moral development seems entirely subjugated to his appetite for sexual encounters with his best friend, Dominic, a male teacher, a girl cousin and even a sheep. “I want it all, I want it now!” seems the prevailing ethic.
The narrative proceeds through scenes from school and flashbacks to early childhood, in which it becomes clear that Karl is expected to conform to a certain bush-boere-macho template of maleness and that deviations from this will be met by anger, contempt and psychological counselling. Now and then he is assailed by fear of God, hell and damnation, but usually only when he thinks his sexual activities are about to be discovered.
Although the character of Karl de Man is convincingly flawed and contradictory – for he is both shamelessly opportunistic and an innocent trying to make sense of the world – Behr’s portrait of a young boy growing up homosexual is too stereotyped: the dressing up, love of things feminine, exaggerated hand gestures etcetera, create ultimately a caricature of a gay adolescent. A less obvious touch to the character of Karl de Man may lie in the choice of name, referring perhaps to the literary theorist, Paul de Man – after a distinguished career, it was revealed that he had collaborated with the Nazis in Belgium.
Behr’s preoccupation with betrayal permeates the book. Although Karl appears to be flagrantly faithless, he too endures – perhaps learns from – various betrayals: by his parents who do not love him enough to accept his homosexuality; by the teacher who takes him to bed and drops him with no further support; by the school principal whose primary concern is the reputation of the school.
Embrace is overly and explicitly didactic. For example, Behr uses Dominic and his parents to present not only a sane and accepting view of gay sexuality, but also as the voice of informed left political opinion. Many long and improbably mature and sophisticated speeches are funnelled through the 14- year-old Dominic’s voice. Behr also finds many other opportunities to instruct the reader on music, trees, political theory, the Holocaust/apartheid “crime against humanity” debate. The result is that the novel seems over-elaborated, often boringly tendentious and shamelessly padded out with a view to making it a Long (therefore Serious?) Novel. Too Deadly Serious in fact, almost 600 pages of it.
The schoolmasterish tone is offset by several sections in which he appears to be deliberately and gratuitously offensive. His prurient description of the casual gang-rape of an ewe is likely to give offence to Zulus and Afrikaners, who may not shrug off having such goings on imputed to their nations; perhaps he even hoped to provoke feminists and animal liberationists with this piece of pornography. Then there is a frankly unbelievable “game” called “Nazis and Jews” . There is a great deal of graphic sex (not everyone’s cup of tea) and crude racism.
Despite all this Behr holds the reader’s attention to the end. Which of his lovers will this pubescent Lothario finally betray, and what will be the outcome of his wavering sexual allegiance? Will he opt for the love and sexual happiness offered by Dominic, or will he force himself to conform to the norm of manhood acceptable to his father, most of the teachers and wider society of the Seventies in South Africa?
Anthony Burgess, in his extraordinary novel, Earthly Powers (published in 1980, but covering most of the 20th century) addresses, inter alia, the question of grace and whether it is available to homosexuals. Toomey, the manic and irreverent homosexual protagonist, takes on the church and society in a spirited, moving and profoundly erudite debate; he remains faithful to his argument that God made him thus (gay), and learns to live with his homosexual identity. In accepting this, Toomey has grace, dignity and integrity in abundance. The tone of the novel is never less than confident and assured, never gratuitously prurient. And of course it is funny, ironic, hilarious, bitter.
Behr’s tone by contrast is challenging in a sulky, adolescent way, perhaps partly because of the youth of his protagonist. And it is not so much Karl de Man’s sexually omnivorous behaviour that subverts his claim to grace, but the fact that he betrays everyone in the novel -friends, lovers and family – in his unremitting quest for personal gratification, and by the end of the novel seems no nearer resolving his sexual identity.
The coup de grce however, is the novel’s total lack of humour, without which it can only plod heavily on, singularly ungraceful, an embrace to be avoided.