The hero of The Restless Supermarket is Aubrey Tearle, a proofreader of telephone directories. He lives in a massively detailed verbal landscape that is at once pedantic and darkly comic. Its topography is flagged by diacritics, its contours are “Spoilt material, repetitious and dull verbiage, misplaced stops, misspellings, solecisms, anacolutha”. Tearle is a linguistic curmudgeon, fighting his lonely war against disordered language. The tale is set in the failing years of apartheid, the time of Codesa and Nelson Mandela’s release.
Underlying the spreading horror of vulgar speech and commercial jargon is a darker pandemic of creeping social change. Tearle’s order is increasingly distempered as working-class yobbos and dark-skinned people offend his brittle sense of propriety with their manners, insulting his ear with their accents.
His outer world is Hillbrow and environs, its centre is the Café Europa. The café is at first shabby but genteel, much to Tearle’s satisfaction. As society at large transforms and disintegrates, so the clientele and atmosphere of the café follow suit. Much of the action is placed in this limited setting, and most of the narrative is concentrated in Aubrey Tearle’s obsessive soul. Vladislavi´c reflects on the risk inherent in such concentration: “The proofreader is a tightrope artist, managing the difficult tension between momentum and inertia, story and stock, sentence and word … If he is to survive this hazardous passage without falling, he must find the still moving point between the excitement of the chase and the rapture of possession.”
Tearle’s meditations on the properties of error are witty, dry and sustained. They are often brilliant, particularly in invoking what automatic or malformed speech might possibly say about being human, about being conscious. Yet their matter is painted on such a small surface that the narrative in the first half threatens to sag under the burden of its erudition — for example, the 31/2 -page digression on the virtues of proofreading dictionaries, as opposed to telephone directories. There are many digressions of this nature, and their effect mounts, generating too much brittle substance.
But relief comes in part two, in which the novel takes flight and soars beautifully over its own carefully prepared ground. There is an urban landscape painted on the wall of the Café Europa, a picture that occasionally reflects in its contents Tearle’s misadventures. Tearle dubs it Alibia, and characterises it in these terms: “It was a perfect alibi, a generous elsewhere in which the immigrant might find the landmarks he had left behind.”
In part two, the narrative falls through the looking glass — more appropriately, the paper mesh — and enters the world of Alibia. Here the flux of transition becomes physical fact, documentation is transcribed into event. Buildings move position, entire suburbs are reconfigured, all the buttons of the world fall off. Alibia is in a crisis of physically expressed transition; but the heroes of order are to be found in the Society of Proofreaders, shifting the world back into shape with stroke after stroke of their blue pencils, restoring the city map to its proper precincts, resetting the addresses in the phone directory, and deleting (only as a last resort) everything unacceptable.
Though the verbal wit is unfailingly adroit, the comedy of manners sometimes misfires, particularly in the person of Wessels, that ghastly generic Dutchman with a comb in his sock whom no amount of transformation will kill off. Yet, within the structure of the novel, Wessels is put to subtle use — he becomes a caricature of Aubrey Tearle, a double who externalises Tearle’s own unacknowledged banality. Most of the characterisation is economical and sharp.
One might consider a spectrum along which fantasies can be arranged, with politically exact satires such as Animal Farm at one end, and works of enclosed imagination such as Alice in Wonderland at the other, books that delight in their own purposeless inventions, images of the mind itself rather than of society.
It would be hard to place The Restless Supermarket along that spectrum. The target of its satire is a syndrome rather than a disease: urban decay, the commercialisation of speech, linguistic sloppiness, change itself, the dilution of pure language in any form; and by a deeply ambiguous revolution of its inner logic, people who don’t like the above. It could be summed up as a writer’s self-mocking jihad against inanity: Aubrey Tearle is protagonist and antagonist at once. But the scale and energy of the work, the richness of its invention, seem strangely excessive measured against its arcane, diffused satiric focus; these qualities tend to place it more clearly in the apolitical treasury of priceless nonsense.
This ambiguity of genre is interesting because Aubrey Tearle’s war reflects a struggle of dislocation affecting post-apartheid South African fiction at a different level, a search for new bearings in the writing itself. Though there are familiar dystopic elements in this novel, the politics of fiction are shifted (but only halfway) to a fresh centre: the narrator is exiled only from the common exchanges of meaning, the daily negotations of value, that make life bearable for anyone other than himself.
The Restless Supermarket has its faults, but it is beautifully written, intelligently conceived, and often very funny. I believe it is the one of the best South African novels I have read in years. In fact, it is one of the best novels of any kind I have read in years.