JUDGING A BOOK BY ITS COVER:The Street by Paul McNally
When I lived in Westdene, Johannesburg, Ontdekkers Road was a usual route in and out of town for work or pleasure. Entering the road from Westdene and heading out in a northwesterly direction, it is hard to tell where it begins and ends.
It’s that street that is conjoined on either side by other streets along its path. It starts off as Main Road near the Helen Joseph Hospital and turns into Voortrekker Road somewhere near the Laërskool Generaal De La Rey in, er, Delarey. This drag separates the north of Jo’burg from the rest of the plebs, in much the same way as Empire Road does.
In other ways, though, Ontdekkers is a false boundary, straddling a city that seems to heave and shift under its antiquated, separatist town planning. What you don’t see explicitly, driving in and out of town, is that this transitional state of its storefronts also translates to lives on the margin, caught in the spirals of addiction and hopelessness. The dive bars and the dodgy roadside flats and motels probably allude to this.
Police cars ambling about and circling corners might give you the impression of law and order doing its best to nail crime. Driving past, you might miss the true nature of “police presence”.
At any given time of daylight, Ontdekkers strains under the mass of human and car traffic, giving its underside plenty of room to camouflage itself.
Paul McNally’s The Street (Picador Africa), which details the entangled web of police corruption and drug dealing that takes place along the street, bears on its cover a snapshot of the street that appears to be taken from inside the driver’s side of a vehicle moving westward, perhaps in the direction of Roodepoort.
It appears at the very bottom of the book, in a cover otherwise emblazoned in bold, smudged type with the author’s name and the book title. The street is uncharacteristically quiet and forlorn. Cars are visible up ahead, but the block foregrounded in the image is mostly empty, with what looks like mattresses balanced against the wall of a storefront to the left. The image is parched and whitewashed, as if Ontdekkers has been snowed under.
The designer leaves just enough storefront signage to let you know that this is pawn shop and dodgy car dealership central.
In McNally’s book, Ontdekkers is indeed snowed under. The drug of choice here is methcathinone, cat for short. Dealers pop out of the crevices to serve idling cars, only to pop out again to drop notes into the idling cars of police. Most drug dealer arrests are fake. Moreover, truth is stranger than fiction, with police even marrying drug dealers instead of shutting down the trade. Many police take bribes because tackling corruption exceeds their jurisdiction and field of responsibility, and McNally gives insight into this status quo.
The book is immersive, but as an outsider, the author’s tale is secondary, carried mostly by his proximity to the principal actors. In this sense, the image is poetic, as if waiting for the narrator, the reader, or better yet, a longtime resident of Ontdekkers, to colour it in, beyond the last pages of the book.