It’s simply the best South African novel I’ve read in ages. Russel Brownlee’s debut, Garden of the Plagues, is another successful product of the University of Cape Town’s post–graduate school of creative writing, and he dedicates it to André Brink “for his generous mentorship”. There is something a little Brinkish about Garden of the Plagues, but that is perhaps no more than a brief echo of The Wall of the Plague in the title.
Brownlee’s novel is set in the late 1600s at the Cape, a time when Simon van der Stel was the Dutch outpost’s governor. In the ramshackle settlement around Table Bay, still a long way to being Cape Town, live a variety of characters, from the commandant himself all the way down to the dronkie whose habitation is an upturned boat on the beach. There’s the silent woman rescued from the plague, or the scheming proprietress of the shorefront bar, and the nervy young teacher sent out from Holland to try and educate the denizens of this backwater. Garden of the Plagues is the kind of novel that doesn’t just have characters; it has denizens.
When a ship bearing four dead people arrives in the bay, the man sent to investigate and, if possible, contain it is a gardener — Adam Wijk. He’s not just a gardener, of course. He has a complex history, which gradually unfolds.
It is around Wijk that the the narrative and the other characters move in loose spirals. Garden of the Plagues is perhaps a bit too loosely organised — I’m still wondering how Wijk managed to find underclothes for the silent woman after he’d burnt hers, intuiting them to be infected. But Browlee’s concern is clearly not with narrative thrust per se, and it shows in his fine prose, which bears some of the dignified cadences of the distant past yet also the hallmarks of a very contemporary sensibility.
Through the figure of Wijk, and his fascination with the real causes of plague, Brownlee is able to examine how it was at the start of the period now ending — the Enlightenment. The end of the Enlightenment has been a hot issue since postmodernism kicked in sometime in the late 1960s, or whenever it was.
Brink, famously a Sestiger, is also interested in looking back at the past from the sceptical vantage point of the present. Many of his novels in his oeuvre of “awesome abundance”, as Antjie Krog put it, have seemed almost scarily located in the present tense, but there is a parallel strand that has kept mining the more distant past. There is also, to set against what you might call his realist novels, a strand of fantasy in Brink — it goes all the way back to Orgie in 1965, appears decades later in The First Life of Adamastor and On the Contrary, and co-exists with the harshly realist mode in Imaginings of Sand.
Praying Mantis, Brink’s new novel (his 20th or so), has, like Brownlee’s, a historical setting. In Brink’s case it is a century and a half later, the early 1800s. But Brink is writing an ordinary historical novel even less than Brownlee is. This book, he has said, was his birthday present to himself on the occasion of his 70th birthday — a birthday that has been an on-going celebration since May. There are even André Brink 70th-birthday promotional or commemorative mugs and T-shirts.
Certainly, in Praying Mantis Brink is enjoying himself, spinning yarns to weave a playful, phantasmagoric account of Cupido’s life story. It is enjoyable for the reader too, even if there is an underlying tragic dimension, and Brink’s prose in English can be rather clunky. He is a master storyteller, conjuring webs of narrative around the mystic misfit Cupido, who really did exist — he was the first Khoi/Hottentot person ordained by the London Missionary Society in South Africa.
South African literature has long felt pressed to exist in an unequivocal present-day, and many of its finest texts still read like red-hot dispatches from the frontline. Nowadays, it seems obsessed with the relatively recent past and its hangover. But Praying Mantis, like Garden of the Plagues, shows how fruitful it can be to go back even further into our complicated history and try to re-imagine it for today.
Garden of the Plagues is published by Human & Rousseau, in its first foray into English-language fiction. Praying Mantis is published by Secker & Warburg