Out of Shadows by Jason Wallace (Andersen Press)
Jason Wallace’s debut novel, set in the early to mid-1980s, imagines an assassination attempt on Zimbabwean prime minister Robert Mugabe by fanatical right-wing students at a school speech day.
The novel is set in Haven School, a private boys’ high school in the Zimbabwean countryside east of Harare (based on the real-life Peterhouse). Zimbabwe is a newly independent country emerging from a vicious war and Haven School remains a bastion of old Rhodesian values. The headmaster, staff and pupils steadfastly refuse to come to terms with the transformation demands of Mugabe’s black majority government.
The protagonist’s situation is derived from the author’s own experience: Robert “Jacko” Jacklin is fresh from England, the son of a British diplomatic corps staffer, who has been thrust into Haven School as a first-former.
Jacko’s father admires Mugabe, the freedom fighter, as “a great, great man”. He is determined for his son to make friends with the first smattering of black pupils admitted to Haven. Principal among these boys is Nelson Ndube, a first-former like Jacko, who is viewed as a “filthy kaffir” by his white dormitory mates and bullied incessantly.
Jacko is also a fish out of water. Seen as a “Pommie bastard”, whose government betrayed Ian Smith’s white-minority regime and handed power over to blacks, he is reviled only slightly less than Ndube. Unlike Ndube, however, Jacko is white. Eager to ingratiate himself with his dorm-mates — and especially the dangerously charismatic Ivan — he commits a heart-rending betrayal.
Wallace skilfully portrays Jacko’s gradual manipulation by Ivan through an almost imperceptible shift in the protagonist’s first-person narrative voice, which becomes increasingly peppered with racist epithets.
Ivan, the son of a former Rhodesian soldier and farmer, is merciless in his bid to avenge his father’s defeat in the war and his family’s loss of their farm to a twisted “willing-buyer, willing-seller” land deal. Encouraged to view Mugabe as an African Adolf Hitler by his fanatical history teacher, Ivan hatches the assassination plot.
The novel implicitly asks the reader to view a fictional situation with the benefit of historical hindsight. Had Mugabe been assassinated in the 1980s, would Zimbabwean history have been any different? The question is hypothetical and in some ways irrelevant. Indeed, Wallace loses his way somewhat in pursuit of an answer.
What redeems the novel is Wallace’s masterful characterisation. None of his characters, with the possible exception of the saintly Ndube, can be classified as one-dimensional. Even the villain, Ivan, is capable of compassion, as when he comforts Jacko after the latter’s alcoholic mother dies. And the moral dilemmas Jacko faces, further exacerbated by his flaws, make him believable and he evokes our sympathy, even if one does not necessarily like him.
As a former Peterhouse boy (albeit more than a decade after Wallace), I can attest to the authenticity of the schoolboy slang and the evocation of real-life places. Where the novel comes unstuck for me is its deviation from the semi-autobiographical into the fictional as the plot to assassinate Mugabe gathers pace. Of course, the majority of readers who do not have prior experience of Wallace’s setting might not experience this sense of unease. But Wallace’s decision to meld autobiography with fiction is risky and I am not convinced he has concealed a fault line between the two.
Despite the uplifting ending, the different shades of cruelty exhibited by almost all the characters left me feeling distinctly queasy about the dark shadows of the human psyche, my own included. But perhaps the novel’s achievement is that — in making one aware of one’s shadows, it opens the possibility of extricating oneself from them, hence the title, otherwise curious.