Black Petals
Bryan Rostron (Jacana)
Macaulay Vogel, presumably of Scottish and Dutch descent, is the dull-as-ditchwater protagonist of this sadly tedious novel. He is an archivist (which is not what makes him dull — some of my best friends are archivists and historians ) and works in a room in the Castle to order and categorise apartheid-era security police files.
So far, so good — this seems promising and it is, insofar as we get to meet Vogel’s old struggle comrades who all in some way wish to influence what Vogel does with the files. The portraits of the old friends are the best part of the book as they find themselves diverging ideologically as the years go by.
But Vogel himself is too much, or too little, for me. When he finds his own file among the others he goes into a terminal dither about what to do with it, as though his whole identity is bound up in it. Then, when he has finally stolen it and read it — days later — he is mortified to find that he is not who he thought he was. I could have told him that’s quite a common complaint. One has to like the character at least a little bit to care at all about this. Sorry for you, Macauley Vogel, but I could not.
The question — “What did you do in the struggle?” — will probably fascinate us for decades but, 15 years on, when our progress is so slow, I prefer the question, “What now?” Obsessing about what the cops got wrong or didn’t notice back then, especially if one was something of a nonentity, is not rivetingly interesting. I also could not get excited when he remembers he is not of pure European extraction.
The writing is at its best in the portrayal of the comrades. What could have been an interesting excursion into the role of evidence in history and current politics is undermined by laboured and purely decorative parallels, frequently invoked between petals and words and between the files and bones. The files are not quite personified, or demonised, but Vogel thinks they have a life of their own. He crawls repetitively through his daily routines, taking the same daily routes in the city and buying flowers for a long-dead lover every day — by comparison with this existence, the files probably do seem alarmingly lively, powerful and full of agency.
When he finally gets taken away by the men in uniform (white coats might have been better), he has arranged two ways in which his political and personal dignity can be restored. Sigh.
Rostron has had good reviews for previous books, so some readers might want to give this novel a try.