Comic Pieter-Dirk Uys has published a new novel on the Internet. But it doesn’t work Lauren Shantall Many a true word has been said in jest. But master of stage satire Pieter-Dirk Uys really has to be joking if he expects readers to take his attempts at a serious piece of fiction seriously. The sad irony is that the work, Trekking to Teema, is more laughable than laudable.
Perhaps only a fool would have the temerity to rip off someone as skilled at it as Uys. So my opinion places me in an unenviable position. More so, because I, like many others, have much respect and admiration for the man.
His superb wit has slaughtered more than just a few of the sacred cows that graze South Africa’s political landscape. For that we are all grateful, give or take a few MPs. Furthermore, Uys has successfully lived out his slogan, “Adapt or Die”, managing to transform his role, and that of the much-beloved Evita Bezuidenhout, under our new dispensation.
Renowned for quick-fire character switches, Uys has now become a much-needed evangelist. Delivering educational shows in small towns and schools, he has done far more to counter voter apathy and Aids ignorance than even our president. Yet these virtues do not necessarily a good novelist make. So regardless of Uys’s venerable career as a thespian, I’m afraid I’ll have to play the fool and say that Trekking to Teema is almost as bad as Thabo Mbeki’s bungling of the HIV crisis.
Trekking to Teema is being published in installations on the Independent Online website (www. teema.iol.co.za). Set in the early Nineties, the lengthy novel tells the story of an expat Afrikaner returning to South Africa to find his long-lost nanny called Fatima, or Teema. A rather convoluted on-the-road adventure a modern-day Groot Trek if you like takes off from there.
It is difficult to be too conclusive about the virtual book because only half of its 32 chapters are available at this stage. Nevertheless, there is more than enough material to ascertain that Uys has strained to inject humour into the text. Sometimes it comes off, but often the attempt at comic relief seems ill-timed and fails to hide scenes that are clumsily drawn and largely extraneous to the plot.
Some characters, particularly the lead, are developed more fully, but many fail to rise above shallowly drawn stereotypes. Often unconvincing, when these subsidiary characters are coupled with Uys’s bent towards forcing a laugh, they are reduced to mere caricatures. A fat man is not seen as anything more than “a blubber mountain”, and so on.
Yet it is only in such witty inflection that Uys’s writing sparkles. For the most part, his descriptions are run-of-the-mill and his analogies are obvious. He falls into the trap of using too many blunt adjectives (“the dirty concrete of the gloomy station”), where nuance or creative combinations would have been more evocative of mood and tone. Trekking to Teema is thus readable, but not inspiring.
Not afraid to call a spade a shovel, Uys doesn’t mince his words or gloss over racial tensions. The strongest point of the work is that it manages to capture, with unwavering honesty, the anxieties and turmoil of both white and black South Africa as the country shifts from one government to another. In choosing as his protagonist an expat who witnesses these changes with fresh eyes, Uys comments on the notion of cultural relativity and how, thanks to the political forces of our history, we have been socialised into our very “South Africanness”.
But this is not very penetratingly done. What makes me further disinclined to dial-up for the next exciting episode is that the act of reading Trekking to Teema online is cumbersome. Various technical glitches and poor website construction hinder the process. The choice of a Flash interface on the part of creators Radarboy is misjudged. The introduction quickly becomes repetitive, rendering it tedious rather than impressive. Thank goodness for the “skip intro” button, even if it does appear a few frames too late.
That’s the least of it. Navigability is difficult and decidedly unfriendly. The rather belated introduction of “new features” which enhance usability such as being able to click to the beginning of any chapter without having to wade through them all have only come at the behest of fans, rather than through the foresight of the site’s architects.
This is either ineptitude, or a lack of consideration for the users who are the lifeblood of commercial connectivity. In short, the site is clumsy and frustrating a sentiment apparently shared by the majority of readers, if you consider the vast number of complaints in the forum. The site would have been more effective had it just been built in plain, old-fashioned “no frills” html. That’s notwithstanding other technical possibilities which could have transformed the site into the value-added experience for surfers it currently is not.
Neither the manuscript itself which was rejected by all the print publishers Uys approached nor Uys’s name and reputation are enough to excuse the faults of such a heavily advertised and sponsored venture (Radarboy, IOL and Incredible Connection have stuck to Trekking to Teema). Truth be told, the novel emerges as a bit too much of a trek.
And so I’d like to leave you with the words of the master himself: in his press release for the project Uys says, “If you don’t like it there is a whole web to surf and search.”