Gardening at Night
Dianne Awerbuck (Secker & Warburg)
Ayoung widow gardens in silky pink shorts in the cool of the evening after a sweltering day in Kimberley. It is this image that is central to this book. The narrator says: “Maybe the cinnamon of my mother’s embalmed misery summons them…” and by “them” she means men. Though this is mainly the story of the narrator, her mother’s life is at the root of things, and she keeps coming back to it.
Why this book should be called a novel is a bit of a mystery. Presumably most of it is fiction, though it is told in the first person, and the protagonist-memoirist is the author, Diane Awerbuck. Just how much of it really did happen will be known only to those people really close to her. If it is autobiography why not just say so, since it has the long, baggy shapelessness of a lived life, forgiveable in a memoir, less attractive in a novel.
Her story begins in Kimberley where very early on her Jewish biological father is ejected from the family and then commits suicide. Her Anglican mother remarries an Afrikaner and the household soon has six children in it. Bankruptcy and divorce follow. Toward the end of the book Awerbuck observes: “My mother phones me. Whenever I hear her voice my first instinct is to brace myself … because there is always something heavy coming…” And near the beginning this same mother prefaces news of the suicide with: “More drama, kids. Daddy Jock shot himself.” And so it goes for much of the book, for Awerbuck may be more like her mother than she realises. Readers need to brace themselves for an ongoing deluge, a “sea of troubles”, which also includes abortion, abandonment, deaths from car crash, overdose and diving off a bridge. And cancer, including a gory biopsy.
She fends off domestic disaster, the perceived banality of her environment and the confusions of her parentage with clever quips and often cynical observations. Whether these quips are feisty (see dust jacket) or smart-alecky is debatable. The day-to-day superficiality of a middle-class white existence in the Eighties and Nineties in South Africa is often well caught, and Awerbuck will raise many smiles (or grimaces) from her own generation as well as the baby boomers who have had to parent them. She offers no critique of this insulated, consumerist, apolitical mindspace, innocently and ignorantly occupied by her social peers. And at a time when repression and injustice were at their height she seems most afraid of fat, poverty and middle age.
In an interview on SAfm she said that she had deliberately not written a “struggle novel”, which one can understand and respect, but she could have situated her experience a little more intelligently within the context of her time as, for example, did Alexandra Fuller in Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. (Which, by the way, Fuller says she wrote as a novel several times before finally deciding to do it as a straight memoir.) In one of the few political references in the book she tells — self-mockingly? — of being caught in the city centre of Cape Town during the rioting that took place at Chris Hani’s memorial service; she is astounded that she has been attacked and slapped by the youths running wild in town and says, “Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life?” (Probably not, darling.)
Yet throughout this rambling pastiche of a life lived till about thirtyish, there are many gems: the library ladies “mother us from a distance with their woolly chests” (one has to forgive the stereotyping of librarians); a boyfriend has “casual elbows” and one feels there is a lot of talent waiting there to be put to proper use now that the autobiographical “novel” is out of the way. And please, the glossary needs some work. Dolosse are not named for their inventor.