Gwen Ansell reviews Bleeding Kansas by Sara Paretsky; Jane Rosenthal reviews Kathie and Don’t Tread on my Dreams by Dora Taylor.
Bleeding Kansas by Sara Paretsky (Hodder & Stoughton)
Sara Paretsky is best known as the creator of the Chicago private-eye VI Warshawski. In the stand-alone novel Bleeding Kansas, however, she abandons the big city and detection and returns to the state of her birth for an examination of the parts of the United States that Hillary Clinton atavistically woos and Barack Obama sometimes doesn’t quite seem to get.
The sub text of Bleeding Kansas is that the politics of rural America are far more complex and nuanced than many commentators acknowledge. While conservatism, puritanism and a dour millenarianism flourish, there is also a rich radical tradition. Nineteenth-century Kansas farm wives in heavy woolen skirts formed one link in the underground network that assisted escaping slaves — and were killed, raped and burned out of their homes by pro-slavery vigilantes.
Sixties anti-war counterculture left its own traces on this legacy; today the malign influence of agri-business overlays it, threatening to erase whole communities and leaving young men little future but the army.
A present-day feud between two farming families, the Grelliers and the Schapens, echoes, replays and distorts the past, catalysed by the arrival of bisexual divorcee Gina Haring from the city and the nervous breakdown of idealistic farm wife Susan Grellier.
Paretsky’s strengths as a writer have always been rooted in an evocative sense of place and vivid characterisation; even her walk-on characters live. Here she also extends Warshawski’s dry PI wisecracking into a wicked gift for high or — depending on your viewpoint — low satire in her take on the millenarian fantasies of born-agains of all faiths, and the ways these converge to shore up national warmongering. Counterpointing tragedy and comedy, Burning Kansas is a moving, thought-provoking novel that forces readers to empathise beyond the easy stereotypes of America’s rural heartlands. — Gwen Ansell
Kathie by Dora Taylor (Penguin) and Don’t Tread on My Dreams by Dora Taylor (Penguin)
In the words of one eminent South African: ‘Caches of old papers are graves, you shouldn’t open them.” This is how Nadine Gordimer starts the story, A Beneficiary, in her new collection and goes on to show that what one finds may lead to obsessive further investigations. I could not help thinking of Dora Taylor’s two manuscripts which were recently retrieved from the archived papers of the author.
The novel, Kathie and a collection of short stories, Don’t Tread on My Dreams have the quaint alluring power of old photographs. One might consider their publication to be a bold move given that so much recently written fiction is being published in South Africa, but they are well supported by dust-jacket shouts from contemporary academics. Dorothy Driver, at the University of Adelaide, and known for her work in the field of South African letters, has written an afterword.
These works invite the reader to penetrate the strange otherness of that earlier period and the elegant formality of their writing is equalled by the stern and uncompromising attitudes expressed in them. These attitudes are not only those of the author herself, but also of her characters whose expressions of gross racism and even hatred are quite startling in these times when political correctness (and a broader willingness to work towards racial harmony) encourages more nuanced, complicated, even veiled portrayals of relations between the races.
Kathie tells the story of a girl born too dark for the liking of her coloured mother and grandmother, while her younger sister, Stella, comes into the world with a paler skin and straight hair. The story follows the lives of these two girls, but especially Kathie’s life, through their schooling, their love lives, and their working lives — Kathie becomes a highly skilled nurse. Intensely observed and involving, their intertwined yet alienated stories show up racial prejudice in different sectors of society. I found Kathie to be slow-going initially, but it does warm up considerably. Some of the most winning characters throughout are young black men and interesting dialogue comes out of the debates Taylor constructs for her characters in isiXhosa communities.
The short stories are less elegiac in tone and more dynamic. And here Taylor more often represents the point of view of white South Africans as in The Advocate’s Story — an advocate takes on a case defending a young black man accused of rape and finds his customary racism displaced by admiration — and No Other Home, in which a young businessman rats on his friend and bitterly regrets it.
Taylor was born in Scotland and, unusually for the 1920s, graduated from university in the field of English literature. She then came to Cape Town with her husband who taught psychology at UCT. In South Africa she was politically active, which cannot have been easy in the minefield of Capetonian politics, and was closely associated with the Non-European Unity Movement. In her afterword Driver writes that part of Taylor’s unique contribution is that she sees the world in terms of economic forces. She worked closely with IB Tabata, but one wonders whether she knew other female political activists in Cape Town in the 1940s, notably Dora Tamana and Ray Alexander, both in the South African Communist Party. Perhaps divisions in the far left would have kept them apart.
In her fiction Taylor passionately takes up the cause of the poor and downtrodden and sometimes sentimentally (as in the disappointing last page of Kathie). Often there is a tone of self-righteousness in the authorial voice and one wonders who she considered her readers to be. According to Driver she would most likely have seen her audience as young black activists because most of the whites in her stories were ‘incapable of change”. It is this that made me think that perhaps reopening this cache of papers might have some undesirable effects. Who is the readership envisaged by the publishers and those who are promoting these works? And what purpose does this serve?
It is also interesting to note that, though almost certainly unconscious of this, Taylor was not entirely free of prejudice herself. This manifests in the two stories that have Jewish characters, The Rebel and The Midas Touch. Although both good stories, they come uncomfortably close to anti-Semitism, as both describe Jewish men and fathers who seem cast in the stereotype of the Jew whose main concern in life is making money, lots of it. It is quite likely that these inconsistencies in attitude are part of the ‘valuable contribution to South African social history” which Vivian Bickford Smith sees in Taylor’s work. — Jane Rosenthal