Tom Eaton considered publishing his latest novel under a pseudonym. “At first I was worried,” he admits. “But then I thought, this is what I want to write. It will be interesting to find out how people respond to it.”
The audience for his satirical fiction and columns “tend to be intelligent and well read”, he says, so perhaps some of his existing fans will also enjoy The Wading (Penguin), which marks his first foray into literary fiction. As such, it could be considered a gamble when his readers know him chiefly for satires such as The De Villiers Code and humorous short pieces.
So is there a market for literary fiction? “It’s growing. All our literature is growing so very well. The rise of crime fiction no one saw coming — because South Africa is known for big, slow, dark, political thrillers.”
Eaton is enthusiastic about the new generation of writers. “There are some great writers at the moment, like Ceridwen Dovey,” he says. “She’s exceptional and she’s a baby — only 26 or something.
“There’s a cadre of black writers coming through who are young, ambitious, driven guys and it’s great. We need our literature to be demographically representative and at the moment it’s sustained by white voices and white buyers.
“I once interviewed Zakes Mda and I asked him where the black writers were. He got so angry. He said, they’re everywhere, you just don’t know them.”
As for Eaton, he prefers the tried and tested. “I don’t read a lot of contemporary stuff and that’s purely my taste. I have about a hundred books at home and I read them over and over again. I like Ian McEwan, but I tend to stick to Joseph Conrad and John Fowles. There are so many incredible novels out there. You’ve got to get through the good stuff first before you get up to date. I tend to be quite a traditionalist. That archaic, old-fashioned style of writing appeals to me. I don’t like hard, modern writing.”
The Wading is a novel suffused with melancholy, a world where everything is gently decaying, with indeterminate geography and one young man wondering about life beyond his island home. The pace is slow and meditative. It’s been called post-apocalyptic, but Eaton rejects this label.
“Post-apocalyptic implies that you’re hanging on by a thread, that the future is bleak. This world is completely sustainable. There obviously has been some social breakdown in the north, but it’s not the end of the world.”
Still, post-apocalyptic fiction seems a popular genre at the moment, I say.
“I think it speaks to our age quite a bit, that we’re drawn to that post-apocalyptic fiction. We’re in a pessimistic age and there’s a lot of fear in the world, fuelled by the media,” Eaton says. “I resigned from most media jobs in January and then I spent a month where I didn’t watch news broadcasts or read the paper. And I stopped being paranoid, grumpy and cynical. I saw that people are living normal lives, most of us are trying to be good people, that we’re not all going to hell.”
And for white South Africans, life really has got worse. “People don’t talk about it, because it sounds racist, but it’s not. The country [we had before] is gone, and what is left is a worse place. I hate it when people write about growing up white under apartheid and how it was so hard. It was an ignorant utopia,” he says.
Now, whites are facing up to a past that wasn’t as good as it seemed and “things winding down”, as Eaton puts it. “It comes with real life. The machinery is winding down to a sustainable level.”
He’s also anti-Cape Town. “I live there, but there are lots of major problems. For one thing, there’s this ridiculous pretension that it’s a piece of Europe when it’s so clearly a Caribbeanised, creole orphan. And they keep saying it’s such a beautiful city when it’s not. It’s a completely ordinary, ugly city that happens to be in beautiful countryside. It’s cut off from the real world.”
These days screenwriting is taking up much of his time. “It’s chaotic, very fast-paced. It’s a lot of fun and it’s hugely frustrating. But it’s so exciting to see your words turning into a whole world. [With screenwriting] you need to say it all in half the time. It teaches you to be very succinct and to get to the point, where novels are a retreat back. I love dialogue, I love writing dialogue where people don’t say much but they say a lot. In a novel you’ve got time to do that, whereas in a movie you don’t.”