Of wild dogs
by Jane Taylor
(Double Storey)
An artist at a fictionalised South African museum in Cape Town collapses and dies while collecting flora from a wild dog diorama. Her English lover, Ewan Christopher, is on his way to her flat, but decides to surprise her at the museum and arrives soon after the tragedy. Inspector Cicero Matyobeni is already there and, when the death is attributed to poisoning, the two link up — although not comfortably — to find the killer.
Jane Taylor is an academic of note; she occupies a chair of dramatic art at the University of the Witwatersrand and is currently a visiting fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford. She has written plays for the Handspring Puppet Company, notably Ubu and the Truth Commission; directed opera; and written extensively on South African culture.
This background is relevant to the book. It’s well paced, as one would expect from an author who has worked in theatre. And only someone familiar with the world of academe would devise such an astonishing motive for a homicide.
The book is solidly grounded in South Africa. We are told that the victim, Hannah Viljoen, spent years in London among an exile community before coming back in the early 1990s; she describes herself as “a coloured girl with an English accent and a disposable income”, ridiculed by the local café owner for referring to dhania as coriander. A sub-plot follows two lesbian lovers who are observing and photographing the few remaining packs of wild dogs still in existence outside game reserves and an aged farmer with designs on what he believes to be mineral-rich land from which a community was removed decades ago and to which that same community wishes to return.
There is only one major flaw in Of Wild Dogs: the most interesting character by far is the victim. Although we see her often in flashbacks of varying lengths — some no more than a paragraph, others an entire chapter — she is already dead when the story begins. Throughout the book, hovering in the background, is a sad sense of regret.