Three women active in the British suffragette movement of the late 19th and early 20th century — Emmeline Pankhurst, her daughter Sylvia and fellow campaigner Helen Craggs — are the central characters and narrators of Michiel Heyns’s impressive new historical novel, Bodies Politic (Jonathan Ball). Once again Heyns, a former English professor at Stellenbosch University, has set his story outside South Africa. While this is generally unusual for South African writers, Heyns delivers the readers with a “triple whammy” — he writes from the point of view of not one but three women.
The pivotal event that binds the narrative together is the death from poliomyelitis of Harry Pankhurst, Emmeline’s son. Neglected by his mother, who had always insisted that he be self-sufficient, Harry had always tried to please his mother, with little success. As he lies dying, Emmeline returns from campaigning in the United States to find that Sylvia has persuaded Helen to come to London to be by Harry’s bedside. Sylvia knows that some time earlier Helen and Harry had worked together on a suffrage campaign — and that, unknown to Helen, Harry had been attracted to her.
This decision on Sylvia’s part, and Helen’s agreement, alienates them from Emmeline. Sylvia and her mother further part company when, in 1914, Sylvia actively campaigns against the war while Emmeline becomes a strong supporter of the British war effort. The final alienation comes when, in 1928 while Emmeline (now a Tory) is campaigning for a seat in Parliament in London’s East End, Sylvia has a son with her Italian anarchist partner Silvio Corio. Emmeline dies soon after, an unredeemed Lear figure, unreconciled with her daughter.
These events, their antecedents and consequences are movingly told from three different perspectives: of Emmeline (in 1928), of Sylvia (in 1952) and of Helen (in 1960). Memories are triggered (as often happens) by contemporary events: Emmeline receiving news of Sylvia giving birth; Sylvia being interviewed by another former suffragette who is preparing her obituary in advance (a common practice, it should be noted); and Helen telling her husband of the incident on their reading Sylvia’s obituary in the Manchester Guardian.
Throughout these three versions of the story are an array of characters — historical figures, though perhaps represented fictionally — connected to the three women by activism, love and hostility. Each woman gets her chance in the narrative to interpret the events; their own life stories reveal their public and private networks of interlinking relationships — not least their motivations for acting as they did at the time of Harry Pankhurst’s death.
Compelling and at times very moving, this is a daring novel, in which Michiel Heyns takes a series of literary risks.
It is often claimed that it is very difficult, dangerous, to write a first-person narrative from a gender perspective opposite to one’s own. Quite often the added comment is that it leads to sexist stereotyping. Heyns breaks “the rule” three times, presenting three quite different — and to my (admittedly male) mind believable — female narrators. None fit any of the negative “feminine” stereotypes — all three are strong, complex figures whose worldviews are shaken by the events and the interplay of each other they recount. Yet they are also products of their history and social class: Heyns does not compromise with contemporary political correctness by allowing 21st-century sensibilities to undermine his characters’ credibility.
As he did with The Typewriter’s Tale, his fictional exploration of the life of late Victorian novelist Henry James, the story has nothing to do with South Africa, something extremely rare for a South African novelist to do. To some readers this — a South African writer writing about a non-South African subject — might seem literary heresy. At the very least, eyebrows might be raised in some circles about the appropriateness of doing this. Surely, goes one argument, one should write about what one knows?
Well, as a scholar of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, Heyns is steeped in late Victorian-Edwardian literature and history — as well as any novelist who writes about the Boer War, the struggle in the 1950s or the 18th-century Cape. Unless they’re pretty ancient, historical writers write about things they’ve not directly experienced but know through research. What’s more, Heyns demonstrates in this novel that he knows far more about history than just the facts. He knows that history is not just a set of facts, but how fact is experienced — the same events from multiple perspectives. Indeed on one level his novel is an invitation to do just that: see history from a multiplicity of perspectives, ruled by converging and diverging subjective experiences and rooted in persons’ social environment.
Moreover, to say that South African writers should only write on South African subjects is literary parochialism. Writers write about what interests them, what moves them. And readers should read good stories wherever they come from — New Yorkers read the novels of Colombian Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Muscovites read André Brink, and Jo’burgers read Ian McEwan. We read what we read because fiction opens us up to new perspectives, new experiences, yet in some way or another it resonates with ourselves.
Bodies Politic resonates on a number of levels: on an intellectual level as a meditation on perspective in history; on a historical-political level as a study of the relationship between activism and family; on an emotional level as a reflection on love, guilt, loyalty and the difficulty to truly forgive. It deserves also to resonate at the bookshop sales counter.