Guy Willoughby has spooled out serial radio scripts in his day, and lived as that one-man show Major Schisstirrer for many years, during our maniac military period, stirring the national potjiekos from an insider’s point of vantage — so he knows how to set up scenes and to cause trouble.
More recently he has kept his claws sharp as the all-purpose Cape Town arts critic for the Mail & Guardian. But to manifest himself as a first novelist at his age, when he is so well considered in his other garbs — now, that is a surprise. It is also highly brave of him.
His novel, Archangels [published by Brevitas], is about a recent Cape summer playtime careering towards a terrible touristic Christmas, about white flight and unbundling ceremonies, about being racy rather than racist, about human feelings in perpetual denial and shagging as a desperate measure on the lounge floor, preferably someone else’s lounge floor, in Rosebank or is it Claremont, shagging with any other person to hand as well, just as long as it’s a good shag, or a good schnarf — a word I hadn’t read before — at the perfect pardy, or whatever, where, eesh, everything’s kif, and the lanky angelic being of the title can talk in a pet about kvetching teefs wiring up for the vision splendid, and that’s dinkum …
Somewhere Willoughby has picked up all this kind of gab. But although Archangels reads as it is meant to read, as a strenuously and relentless autobiographical confession, probably it is no such thing. Probably it is not at all one man’s desperate coming out of the closet — or, in this case, out of the toilet, where in this book most of the interesting action occurs.
Archangels is about highly articulate, spoiled people who have every comfort of the new century, and know everything about everything, and yet are incompetent and utterly ignorant and know nothing at all.
At one point the red-haired, freckled-faced wife of the story perks up with: “Maybe we thought we were living in a novel or something?” “A novel by whom?” responds the tireless main character, still alert for a meaningful footnote, even if the main text has long gone adrift. “Dunno,” she replies, but then she inserts, of all people, the name of Anita Brookner.
But Willoughby really has other inspiring sources in mind: Oscar Wilde, Jean Genet and also Tony Kushner, those more theatrical type of writers like himself, who mean more to affront than distract their readers, who instead of sowing sympathy sow deep distress.
Guy has produced his rather beautiful, and definitely pretty devastating, first novel — at last.
This is an edited version of Stephen Gray’s launch address.
Archangels can be ordered from bookshops, or from Brevitas publishers at [email protected]