Robyn Alexander
THIRTEEN CENTS by K Sello Duiker (Ink Inc)
SKYLINE by Patricia Schonstein Pinnock (David Philip)
Each of these intriguing first novels opens so as to immediately absorb the reader into its first-person narrator’s world. K Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents begins with 12-year-old Azure’s introduction of himself – “Ah-zoo-ray. That’s how you say it.” His mother gives him the name for his blue eyes, which, combined with his “dark skin”, make him seem unusual to almost everyone he meets. A few years older, the white female protagonist of Patricia Schonstein Pinnock’s Skyline, by contrast, never tells us her name at all, bluntly beginning her narrative with the news that her father has finally “without any explanation” left her mother, herself and her younger sister.
The two texts have in common their first-novel status, their use of first- person narration (by teenage protagonists), and their setting in contemporary Cape Town. They also share aspects of narrative technique. Both use a predominantly realist mode which details lives lived on the city’s streets with evocative precision. Long Street, for example, features prominently, with its street people, shopkeepers, gangsters and bars brought to messy, vigorous life. Any reader familiar with the Cape Town city centre is bound to find the authors’ part-angry, part-affectionate portrayal of it extremely compelling.
Incorporated with the realist mode, however, are aspects of the artful, magical and fantastic. In Skyline, each chapter ends with a description of a painting, textually separated from the preceding narrative via a string of beads printed across the page and a change to a different typeface. The creator of these works of art is only identified at the end of the novel, allowing the reader to interpret them both when they are first described, and then again, retrospectively and slightly differently, when the painter’s identity is revealed.
Pinnock here attempts to add a mythical dimension to the variety of events – ranging from the most everyday and ordinary to the most historically dramatic and horrific – that are realistically described in the narrative. At first the artwork descriptions seem awkward addenda, rather than integrated elements of the story, but they become increasingly redolent with meaning as they start to create their own language of metaphorical association.
Thirteen Cents includes several episodes in which Azure, an orphaned street child who experiences cruelty and abuse at the hands of almost all the adult characters in the novel, retreats into a trance-like state. He climbs Table Mountain to hide, in fear of gangsters who are attempting to gain control over his body and mind. While living in a small cave, he has violent, apocalyptic visions. The visions are powerfully rendered and stylistically reminiscent of those experienced by Ben Okri’s young protagonist in The Famished Road.
Duiker leaves the novel’s conclusion open-ended, as Azure fantasises the sky splitting open and fireballs raining down on the city, and one senses that there is simply no way the author can bring himself to conclude Azure’s story with finality. The frightening last vision, following on from attempts to gain inner strength by visualising himself as a tough, pitiless seagull, bleakly suggests that Azure’s attempts to come to terms with his alienated, orphaned existence will never be successful.
There is a sense in which Duiker wants Azure to symbolically represent difference itself. The character’s combination of blue eyes and dark skin makes him a target of suspicion, exploitative sexual desire and racist hatred from people across the racial spectrum. As Azure’s street buddy Vincent advises him, for example, his unusual looks mean that he has to be extra careful about what he wears. Because if “coloured” gangster Gerald (or others like him) see him wearing veldskoene, “they think blue eyes, veldskoene, he’s trying to be white”.
Part of Duiker’s point is that coming into contact with difference, in all its exotic, yet threatening glory, is still not an experience with which most South Africans can cope in an understanding and tolerant way. Thirteen Cents’ problem, however, is that the viscerally described, unremitting violence to which Azure is subjected becomes repetitive and the novel thereby finally loses effect.
Both of these novels create a sense of their protagonists as special, unusual characters who are thus both more and less able to cope with the difficult situations in which they find themselves. The narrators also have parental abandonment and neglect in common. But unlike Azure, the protagonist of Skyline is never doomed to literal isolation. Rather, her lonely moments occur within a community in which she experiences both kindness and heartlessness.
Since her mother does not show any affection for either of her daughters, the narrator has to take on the role of mother to her younger, apparently autistic sister Mossie. But both girls receive support and love from a large cast of characters introduced over the course of the novel, most of which inhabit Skyline, the block of flats at the top of Long Street in which they live (and from which the novel takes its title). Skyline’s community seems a bit formulaically constructed, as it is composed of a rather too-carefully selected group of refugees who come from various sites of African warfare, and also includes an elderly Holocaust survivor, a pair of drag queens, and a happily married couple who are both blind.
Pinnock’s most emotionally affecting character is traumatised Mozambican refugee Bernard, who sells flags on Buitengracht Street, lives in Skyline, and becomes an importantly close, supportive friend of the narrator. His tragic story plays a big part in enabling her to come to an understanding of the people and events that have shaped her, and to become a writer. Azure’s tragedy is that he has no Bernard to facilitate a similar process.