Karoo boy
by Troy Blacklaws
(Double Storey)
espite the sombre subject matter of this finely written novel, it remains in the mind as an easy read. A second reading reveals how delicately made it is, how deceptively light.
Put together with a sure narrative touch that indicates that the writer knows where he is heading, it is narrated by Douglas, who begins his story when he is 14.
A beach braai, cricket in the parking lot, ”sunny skies and Chevrolet” — the easy lifestyle of a white South African kid growing up in Muizenberg in the 1970s — comes to a sudden end. Douglas’s twin brother is killed by a freak accident, and the family reels under the shock.
As part of the recovery process Douglas’s mother insists they uproot and go to live in a Karoo dorp. His father does not go with them, but Hope, their aptly named earth-mother maid, does.
Karoo Boy deals with grief and loss, particularly difficult for a twin. At one point Douglas says he is ”untwinned and untwined”. But he finds comfort in the company of Moses, petrol jockey at the Shell garage, a Xhosa stranded without his dompas in the Karoo. In a sense he has lost so much more than Douglas, but in telling him of his own initiation time with the abakwetha, he gets Douglas to see his time in Klipdorp as his own rite-of-passage, in which he has to weather his loss, his adolescence and the rough school in the dorp.
Minor irritations occur in the sort of anachronisms that one feels an editor should have noted. If the intention was to create a pastiche of images and language from different eras in South African experience, this could be acceptable. But as an accurate reflection of the 1970s, it falls short.
A couple of examples: the Hard Rock Café in Sea Point did not exist until the 1990s. And Moses recounts how, when he was a mine-worker, he and his friends would dream of a future when they would drink whiskey and ”see the girls shake their skinny white ass at us”.
It is so unlikely that Moses would use this phrase — ”ass” has only come into South African English in the past decade or so, and then in the mouths of American-influenced youth.
And there is the added problem that in Klipdorp there is that familiar polarisation, romantic but unreal, of good blacks (except for the dangerous township youths, but they are excused) and bad whites. This is too simple and perpetuates old stereotypes.
Although the themes of loss, death and surviving being a survivor predominate, this novel feels like another ”exile” novel, written in the same nostalgic vein as some of Christopher Hope, Eben Venter and Rob Nixon.
Full of a conflicted love, it relies on a telescoped and re-ordered set of memories that sometimes feel, to this reader, just off the mark. But then, memory works like that, whether one is in exile or not.
Nevertheless, Karoo Boy is a novel worth reading, and a fine debut.