The Track
by Katy Bauer
(Jacana)
The track of the title refers to the railway line that runs through the region, linking towns to remote rural landscapes and at the same time threading together the lives of the inhabitants. It also provides transportation for an obscure overseas prince, whose impending visit acts as a leitmotif.
Bauer’s characterisation and descriptive prose are sparkling — alternately hilarious and tragic, often poignant and never dull. There are moments of pure genius.
Take, for instance, the description of the way the bank manager’s dipsomaniac wife’s hairdo unravels when she has one too many: “It was her hair that gave her away. The drunker she’d become, the more she would prod at the great mass of yellow pinned up top.
“Her aim was to keep the hairdo neat, but instead the bun, which started off near the centre of her skull, shifted further to the left and down until the clump of dead matter rested just above her plump powdered cheek.”
Then there’s the ambitious socialite Sara de Beer. At the height of the ostrich-feather boom, she hires an English mentor to induct her into the styles of the fashionable world. Bauer’s account of their interaction when De Beer chooses a red dress for a society wedding — the colour of garden sheds in Britain’s fine homes — is side-splitting.
Where does Bauer come up with this stuff? Has she been living in the Klein Karoo and snorting the dust? I was loath to get in touch and ask her, for fear of spoiling the pure pleasure of reading a brilliant local book that has no pretensions to being the definitive South African novel.
That’s not to say The Track ignores the more sombre realities of life. It has a fair share of wife-battering, rape, poverty and pillaging. This is where the pathos comes in, interwoven with the humour. Bauer’s touch is a fresh, poetic addition to South African literature. This is her debut novel. I hope I can say with certainty that it won’t be her last.