/ 26 August 2002

Holding up a mirror

The theatrical background in which she grew up has left its mark on Lynn Freed. She makes an entrance, her presence is a statement and she seems entirely comfortable with her public persona as she kicks off her shoes, curls up on a couch and answers questions in a torrent of witty, evocative words, delivered in an accent as flatly South African as it was when she left the country a good deal more than half her lifetime ago.

She is back here now to talk about her latest novel, House of Women (Flamingo), but this new, gripping and disturbing work cannot be viewed in isolation. It is part of a continuum that encompasses a great deal of growing up. All Freed’s books have in them something of herself, something of her background, something of her fears and fantasies, her passions and angers and loves.

Perhaps a clue to her fascination with the fictionalised word lies in her assertion that “fiction is orderly. Life’s a mess.”

The writing began way back during childhood in Durban, in the home she grew up in, one of the two houses that play recurring roles in her work (the other is the one in which her mother grew up). In those early days her mother was “my severest and most wonderful critic”.

Freed’s personal script encompassed an undergraduate degree in economics and a doctorate in English literature; roles as teacher, travel agent, compulsive traveller, successful novelist, ex-wife and mother of a daughter who is as far from the tortured offspring of her fiction as is her Californian home from her native Natal.

House of Women she says, was conceived on the myth of Persephone, its heroine captured, raped and confined in an underworld. Her original intention was to place her fictional underworld in her vision of “hell incarnate … an American academic town”.

When that didn’t work for her, she moved the setting to an unnamed island. Which island? “Everybody asks me that. I don’t know, I think it is part Eastern Mediterranean or Middle Eastern, a place that is both cold and hot, both arid and fertile.”

It works, that unknown island. It plays a central role in the magical realism that permeates this strange and unsettling novel with its themes of imprisonment, physical and emotional starvation, vengeance, passion and violence, glimpses of the Holocaust, and the all-consuming love of a mother for her daughter.

Mothers and daughters are a major theme, too, of The Mirror, immediate predecessor to House of Women.

Which is she? Either. Both. “I think in fiction one is as one is in drama … all the characters.” But, she admits, she finds it “hard to think of myself as men” and doesn’t believe her male characters are as rounded as their female counterparts.

Certainly, in The Mirror, she hasn’t bothered to give the men names at all. None of the many who pass in and out of the life of the protagonist achieves a status other than descriptive — “the way she thought of men is the way men think of women”.

Strange that, because “I’m obsessed with the names in fiction, I can’t go on unless I have a name and I always trust myself when I don’t like a name I am using. I think names are immensely important, especially in fiction.”

There is nothing comfortable about Freed’s writing. It is dark and challenging and edgy. She is unswervingly committed to calling it as she sees it, something that did not make her popular when she wrote the controversial and scathingly autobiographical Home Ground. In fact, while she was writing it her publisher advised her: “Don’t show it to anyone, and tell the truth.”

“I adore a certain quality of candour in all writing. I can’t bear anything that smacks of political correctitude. It’s always been like that … long before it became as publicly odious as it now is.”

What she looks for in the novels she reads and hopes to create in the novels she writes is “wonderfully voiced, wonderfully seen fiction, uncompromising and unrelenting”. It’s not an easy route either for writer or for reader. But it works.