The Glasgow-based Zoë Wicomb returns once again to her home ground, the Western Cape, for the setting of her latest novel.
After the satirical anger of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town and the subtle intensity of David’s Story, her new novel gets off to a rather pedestrian start. But it this very ordinariness that proves most engaging as she describes the world of Marion, a middle-aged woman who runs her own travel agency in Cape Town and visits her elderly father in the lower end of Observatory. Her only social life is in the office, where she bosses and mothers her staff, including a young coloured “township” woman who she has taken on in order to comply with labour laws.
Isolated and swaddled — she sometimes feels suffocated — in security, Marion finds herself strangely moved by a victim’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission photograph in a newspaper left lying around by the township girl. Memories and dreams bring to the surface family secrets that she feels compelled to explore. Her comfort zones, identity and failed relationships all come under scrutiny, and it becomes clear that the damage done to families and individuals by apartheid is far from over.
Wicomb utilises imagery that suggests the double role of muslin and net, curtains, veils and tissue paper to enfold and protect, separate and conceal, as well as the contrasting ideas of light and openess to reveal Marion’s world. She looks at the absolute minefield of prejudice and struggle that was the coloured community in the second half of the 20th century and, as ever, does not offer her readers easy resolution for Marion, nor easy forgiveness for her parents as she wrestles with her transformation.
The plot has some puzzling digressions, such as the encounter with a dispossessed old man, Outa Blinkoog, in the Clanwilliam district and a friendship with an old Scot. Both seem to have a didactic purpose. Despite this, the novel leaves a deep impression. Its strength lies in Wicomb’s painfully acute analysis of what people actually did and went through to be classified as white and the devastating price that was paid in terms of loss of family and community.