This dark novel leaves you unconvinced, angry and asking all the ‘wrong’ questions
Deeper Than Colour by James Clelland (Jacana)
One thing this novel may do is to make you ponder, once again, the purpose of fiction and, then you may ask, more specifically, of this novel. What it will not do, which I suspect is what the author wants it to do, is to make you query the nature of reality.
You will, for a while, be immersed in the video clips and memory sticks of the protagonist, be invited to cross into the transient moment being recorded, but what you will take from it is questionable — and this despite a contrived death at the end.
What you will certainly carry away is the anger. In this dark novel Angus either narrates or is the subject discussed by people in his life. He’s an architect, a middle-class, white, English-speaking South African.
In other words, one of the previously advantaged and still luckier than most but for the fact that he is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He is also a misogynist and a racist, which, with the PTSD, make him toxically angry — or just toxic.
The PTSD is a hangover from Angus’s days in the South African Defence Force in the 1980s — he served as a recce in Angola. When we meet him he is pretty far gone. Eleven years into his marriage with Dinah, who makes minor movies, ads and doccies, he has reached the point where he decides to film their miserable life together, using hidden cameras.
This turns out to be a dotty extension or extreme version of the diarising and note-taking his therapist has asked him to do.
In an interview, James Clelland, expressed interest in the effect the camera has on people being filmed — how it alters the life being lived. He said he is also concerned about “the reality rubbish we are surrounded by”.
Examining life
In this novel we have the examined life with easy high-tech available. It’s an interesting idea to explore the life of a man who is self-obsessed to start with, but as he progresses into this self-reflective diarising of everything from his morning coffee to a day in the office, things get to the point where real life is almost extinguished in incessant record and replay.
One could have considerable sympathy with Clelland’s passionate and somewhat mocking take on the Twittering, You-Tubing, Facebooking mode of existence, but Angus is clearly more than a little alienated and one wonders where this is all heading. Can he sustain it? And why?
Ultimately, however, one loses sympathy with him and his project. One could go along with the obsessive recording, the endless self-absorption, but the levels of vitriol are just too high and too sustained. It’s in the examination, in the replay commentary, that he reveals his contempt for everyone in his life.
These people include Dinah, with whom he has a troubled no-sex relationship, his lover, who is a great turn-on but, he thinks, dim and uneducated, and his colleagues. Furthermore, the War of Liberation (the Namibians’ name for the border war) has been over for 20 years and therapy has been available.
So extreme is his corroding anger that you lose faith in him as a character — the whole novel falls apart on probability. After all, it is not a fantasy — it is a drastic take on reality, or Reality, so Angus as Avenging Whinger has to be somewhat credible, at least. Why would Dinah stay with him? How does he manage to keep his job?
This is all a great pity as this novel is absorbingly well written and posited on a serious concern but finally it is unconvincing. It must be said, though, that the differentiation of the voices of the other narrators is skilfully done and provides some essential relief from Angus.
I was particularly unimpressed by the last scene — I do not want to pre-empt it for those planning to read this novel so I cannot say too much — but I do not think the singing could possibly have gone on so long. It would not have been tolerated — in real life. Even in a movie — too stagey.
‘Manifestations of anger’
Looking for other manifestations of anger in South African fiction, Disgrace by JM Coetzee and Triomf by Marlene van Niekerk come to mind. In Disgrace the anger is ameliorated to some extent by the daughter, Lucy, whose world view, if not exactly Panglossian (anathema to Angus), at least posits a new way, a coming to terms. And in Triomf Treppie is both furious and scathingly funny.
Clelland has written an interesting novel but one that is too unremittingly dark to allow the reader to slip into that other world of the novel — one is tripped up too often on the threshold of belief.
It is also a worry that Angus may be seen as a realistic representative of disillusioned, indeed damaged, white males in South Africa. Heaven knows there’s enough whingeing to make even Alec Hogg (merry presenter of the Market Update on SAfm) say the predominant religion in South Africa is pessimism, but men as rancid and desperate as Angus are the exception, I’d say. Of course this is a political or social concern rather than a literary one, but still—
Both publisher and author have ventured into the zone of politics and history. For example, in the “bonsela” interview at the end of the book, the unnamed interviewer states: “The narrative [of the so-called border war] was erased from official history and from the official memories of the soldiers who participated.” Although it is true that the South African public was largely ignorant of it, and clouds of secrecy obscured what was going on in Angola from 1975 onwards, it really is not true or accurate to say “the narrative was erased”.
John Liebenberg’s photographs of the war, recently put together in Bush of Ghosts (Liebenberg and Hayes, Umuzi, 2010), are an important record. This is just one of several books on the topic.
Also, thanks to the internet, many veterans do tell their stories. Readers should be ever cautious where the drama of war and its aftermath can be co-opted into fiction, creating new myths that mutate into “facts”. A startling error of fact occurs in the novel where a character, George, claims to have been in the Battle of Delville Wood in World War II. This should have read World War I (though that would have made George terribly old). More rigorous editing is required to keep the text from irritating generalisations as well as embarrassing dislocations of time.
One has to ask what is Clelland really trying to do. Does this enhance our perception of life in South Africa, does it clarify stuff for us, or is it funny?
No, sadly, it’s about anger, anger turned inward and leading to destruction. There may be some who see this as therapeutic, cathartic, even cleansing. In playing along with reality TV and such media, it ends up being as superficial and ephemeral. Only the anger remains, the national bogeyman.