The Reluctant Passenger
by Michiel Heyns
(Jonathan Ball)
Readers feeling a little bamboozled by the recent fiction/faction forays of South African writers may be pleased to know that this novel is really fiction — that delightful thing, an invented tale about imagined characters but entirely convincing, wise and entertaining. And it is affectionately set in a Cape Town, as many will recognise.
When we first meet Nicholas Morris, protagonist and narrator of The Reluctant Passenger, he is mowing his Pinelands lawn on election day, 1994. So obsessed is he with this, not to mention tired out, that he forgets to vote. He sees himself as a man who leads a “rational and moderate” life, but his office co-workers suspect he even tidies his wastepaper basket.
Morris is, in fact, an environmental lawyer, a concerned citizen whose ascerbic and irritable commentary is often hilarious. He carps on about almost everything: the traffic, office culture, architecture, the legal profession, environmental issues, suburbia. He describes a house in Hermanus as “a Hollywood hybrid of temple, cathedral and squash court”. And of a Durban suburb he says: “In Kloof culture was at best a matter of horticulture, at worst a matter of horses.”
But one suspects that he is not the total prude he purports to be. His closest friend, Gerhard, a fellow lawyer and more of a mensch than Morris, is happily and actively gay. Morris’s relationship with his girlfriend — which includes having to read Middlemarch — is unsatisfactory, but she turns out to be a more interesting character than Morris would initially have us believe.
The plot rollicks along several tracks at once and is sometimes so slick it comes off as a parody of action novels. There is a legal battle against would-be developers in the Cape Point Nature Reserve, and a longer one to defend the rights of the local baboons. In both these instances Morris has dealings with one Luc Tomlinson, a beautiful fellow, described by the irrepressible Gerhard as “the angel of dawning refulgent”. It is Tomlinson, one of the love interests in the plot, who brings Morris face to face with baboons, the actual creatures as well as those lurking in his psyche. Confronting them has wildly liberating consequences.
Morris finds himself up against some bizarrely sinister individuals still occupying positions of power in the immediate post-apartheid years. These include an ingeniously corrupt building contractor, a general and another of whom one could have expected some genuine integrity.
One is tempted throughout to pause and re-read the many thought-provoking observations or lighter asides with which this book is strewn but one finds oneself racing on, hurtling through the plot as, or with, the “reluctant passenger” of the title. The vehicle varies from supermarket trolley and minibus taxi to an ill-fated BMW, all in some way representing the “juggernaut of history”.
Morris’s dour and cautious cynicism is offset by the cheerful resolution of many substrands of the plot. Clearly, the creator of this sophisticated protagonist could not be accused of the Panglossian belief that “this is the best of all possible worlds”, but it is a welcome change to find that someone is prepared, albeit tongue-in-cheek, to concoct a positive train of events for the reader to consider, perhaps even believe in.
This novel, a little didactic here and there (the fault of the characters rather than the author), is a satisfying read on many levels. It shares some of the themes of his first novel, such as understanding being gay, and a meticulous obsession with the way we use language. It is not as poignant and delicate as The Children’s Day, but it is more substantial, more complex and very funny.
And, as they say, “there’s none so queer as folk”.