It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. At least, that was the word from Paris whenever the mail pony got through the barricades. But modernity doesn’t allow for such Gallic bipolarity, and in Chatham, slowly sinking into the freezing mud on the south-eastern outskirts of London, the times have been neither good nor bad, but rather a grey Guardian-reading, egg-poaching, Blair-voting okay.
But that’s all over now. No longer will the children of Chatham spend their weekends playing at being council quality control managers. No longer will their parents save their bonuses for the annual budget cruise in the Med, that strained week at anchor in international waters just over the horizon from Ibiza, playing shuffleboard and comforting the vomiting spaniel as Neapolitan deckhands shovel nuclear waste off the stern. No, Dickens World will be completed in 2007, and boredom will be banished for good by its glamour.
Chatham, you see, is where Charles Dickens spent his boyhood licking soot off carriage axles and slowly turning sputtering racks of rat ribs on makeshift brazier rotisseries. And as all figures in local government know, there is no more fitting testament to a writer’s greatness than a theme park based on his works.
One can only imagine what depths of kitsch will be plumbed, as visitors come through the Ebenezer Scrooge turnstile and on to the cobbled streets heaped with fluffy white drifts of Victorian schmaltz, finally checking into motels that offer a far far better rest than you have ever known. Americans and Japanese will gnaw enthralled on their Please Sir Can I Have Some More™ Moldy Pork Pies as a burly Miss Haversham runs screaming in flames past an upstairs window (as she does every hour on the hour), stuntman Kevin taking special care not to become tangled in his flame-retarding wedding dress. What larks. What chutzpah. What an awfully sad place it will be.
Mercifully, reading is almost extinct in South Africa, and the spectre of a literary theme park does not yet threaten. Literature we have aplenty, but no one reads it, a result, one suspects, of whites being raised on Grensvegter photo-comics and blacks being raised on the symptoms of whites being raised on Grensvegter photo-comics. But whatever the reason for our national philistinism, it seems that we will be spared.
Not that Coetzee World, somewhere in the Karoo, wouldn’t make a compelling day trip. The Roller Coaster of Inconsequence would be a major drawcard, with violent peaks and troughs early on before levelling off into the Ennui Straight and coming to a complete stop among some rusting five-gallon drums.
From there it’s a short walk to the Hall of Mirrors, where the viewer is confronted with a perfect reflection of himself, yet one lit in such a way that he recognises the deadness at his core, and when he at last summons the strength to walk out into the glare, it seems that everything is made of barbed wire.
(Coetzee World would no doubt face a short-lived challenge from Chinua Achebe Land, in which things fall apart, especially the ferris wheel: the centre cannot hold, causing wholesale injury and eventual bankruptcy.)
Meanwhile, on warm summer evenings in Oranjezicht, Brink Boulevard glows and twinkles, Edith Piaf lamenting lost loves on reassuringly cracked vinyl.
Young lovers ride The Couch, a brown corduroy affair marbled with old wine stains and other splotches with more carnal pedigrees.
Below in The Rainy Street, couples try to the navigate tricky emotional disentanglements while dodging deluges, mimes and accordion players, while away across on the West Bank, shots ring out from Pseud’s Corner, where visitors try to assassinate polo neck-wearing diplomats reading art theory and smoking Gauloises.
And then, who knows? Wilbur Smith Island with authentic rotting mummy and wooden dialogue? Schreinerville, where one wears a prickly petticoat and stares at a lizard on a rock all day as the sun shrivels a lone prickly-pear bush? Best close the book on this one.