Two new novels, one from Tasmania and the other from a South African writer, extend our understanding of empire and its consequences. Their settings are a century apart. Each is a hypothetical testament written in the first person. Konrad Muller, in My Heart at Evening, addresses a mysterious suicide, and the light it sheds on the harsh and claustrophobic conditions prevailing in a remote settlement. Nadia Davids, in Cape Fever, chooses an archetypal microcosm, the structured relations between a white woman and her Coloured maid.
Cape Fever is set, so the blurb tells us, in “a small unnamed city in a colonial empire.” J.M. Coetzee in his endorsement links it unilaterally with Cape Town, as anyone familiar with that city would. It’s all there, from the District (Six), the (Malay) Quarter, even to the cannon shot fired at noon from Signal Hill. The novel is set in the 1920s, but there are occasional references to other periods, notably the 1948 election that brought the Afrikaner Nationalists to power. Nadia Davids demonstrates how thoroughly a racially stratified society was already firmly in place before the Nationalists codified and extended it as apartheid.
(Indeed, much of it is still in place — at least in attitudes. Ten years or so ago a black girl in a swank private school classroom sang a Xhosa song. “Thank you Vuyiswa,” responded the teacher, “for singing such a charming foreign song.”)
The novel is centred on the relationship between Mrs Hattingh, a white widow, and Soraya, her Cape Malay maid. Mrs Hattingh lives alone (the maid in a bungalow out the back); the house is old, grand, and approaching dilapidation. Mrs Hattingh and her circle of friends sustain themselves by meeting in each others’ houses. (It could be termed the Gertie circuit.) Implicitly pining for England, they discuss various charitable causes. Mrs Hattingh looks forward to the day — repeatedly postponed — when her son, Master Timothy, will return from London.
Soraya is eighteen, and Davids tells the story in the first person. The edgy nature of the relationship is made clear from the very first sentence: “I come highly recommended to Mrs Hattingh through sentences I tell her I cannot read.” A necessary duplicity, creating a margin in which Soraya can manoeuvre to make her life as a domestic more tolerable. “Always keep something back,” her mother had told her, “there is no need for them to know what you are truly thinking.”
She is treated with an exacting condescension, muffled by occasional kindness. Soraya had applied for a job as cook and cleaner — but that now carries a live-in requirement (since Madam is lonely). At first she is permitted to visit her family once a fortnight, but even that is nibbled away. We must rally for Master Timothy’s return…
Soon there is an insidious intrusion; Mrs Hattingh decides that, since she believes Soraya cannot write, she will — at Soraya’s dictation — write letters to her young man, Nour, for her. Soraya’s letters are transformed by Madam into something more “poetic.” But as she isn’t shown them, (“illiterate”) Soraya doesn’t know that gradually Mrs Hattingh inserts herself, as it were, into her maid’s body to write explicit letters. (She is never given the chance to see or hear Nour’s replies. They are kept under lock and key.)
What Soraya doesn’t know is that this is the second fantasy correspondence Mrs Hattingh is engaged in. She’s heard rumours about the son in England carrying disfiguring war injuries, but of course never brings up the matter. Mrs Hattingh is writing into the void: the arriving letters that so excite her are official ones, rather than from the adored son. All this works towards an explosive ending.
“In this city,” Davids writes, “none of us really knows the truth of the ground we stand upon.” One thing can flip into another. Soraya, leaving the house for the first time after a week, has her bag searched by Mrs Hattingh; she then passes the auction square where black people stood on a block, mouths pulled open, teeth tugged, arms checked for muscle. Spirits hover; magical realism enables Soraya to converse with them. (Even the Gertie circuit indulges in a séance.)
All this underlines, from Prospero and Caliban on, the seemingly immutable nature of black–white relations. But that, too, is ultimately delusional. Delusional/delirium. Cape Fever. “Let it break,” runs the last sentence of the book. “Ya Rab! Let it break!”
Konrad Muller’s My Heart At Evening is an entirely different novel, exploring a particular incident in the past. That past is still omnipresent in Tasmania. It is said that half the population has a convict somewhere in their ancestry, so that when Martin Bryant opened up on twenty-nine people at Port Arthur he struck Tasmania on the funny bone. (Once I was in a pub, a group of tradies at a nearby table. Suddenly there was a touch of the quiets. Only one of them was speaking, softly. About Port Arthur.)
The plot involves real historical characters involved in running the Van Diemen’s Land Company establishment at Circular Head (Stanley), on the island’s northwest coast. The VDL Company was that rare thing in Australia, a British chartered company, which meant that it had complete control of a designated area with full exploitation rights. Henry Hellyer, whose death (in 1832) is central to the novel, was the company surveyor, and explored much of the northwest of the island. That country, some of it almost impenetrable, gives rise to some lyrical descriptive passages.
The first-person narrator is a Dane who had been a convict but, given his worldly experience, is chosen by the governor, George Arthur, to investigate the suicide of Henry Hellyer — all the more puzzling as he was about to move to Hobart to take up a senior position in the Survey Department. In an afterword Konrad Muller explains that his Dane is none other than Jorgen Jorgensen, an adventurer still well-known in Tasmania. His experiences ranged from being present at the foundation of Hobart, to being a Regency blade imprisoned for debt, and — after locking up the Danish governor — Protector of Iceland (for a month).
Hellyer was a solitary figure, refined, affable and kindly. But he was felled by the taunts of the mess, and the scuttlebutt that he had had sex with a young convict lad. The night he decided to end it all, he had fled the mess hut. Governor Arthur, in the well-drawn scene when the Dane reports back to him, got near to what may have been the truth of the matter: Hellyer may have been gay by temperament, but repressed it, he thought totally. All the crueller then that he would be spoken of as if he’d crossed the line: something that might always follow him. “I thought men like that shot themselves,” George V would famously remark. A century earlier, this one did.
There is already a book on Hellyer’s suicide, but a novel can seamlessly move from established fact to probability statement. Muller is respectful of the facts, and follows them as far as he can. (Jorgensen had already been sent to Circular Head, as a convict, and was sent by Arthur as a Special Agent to investigate the building of the Ross Bridge. No great improbability then in fusing the two.) An afterword explains the sources and the moves he has made. The suicide note is Hellyer’s own, complete with cross-outs.
As a novelist, Muller can fill in the gaps. Particularly successful is the scene where the Danish investigator tracks down and talks to the boy who is at the heart of the matter. It turns out that the real villain of the piece is the older convict who compelled the lad to spread the baseless story. Like Claggart in Melville’s Billy Budd, he fancied a pretty youth, and in this case completely dominated and may have abused him.
But to return to Hellyer, who had noted the black cockatoos. A feather serves as a leitmotiv throughout the novel — and is a launching pad for the conclusion. A flight of black cockatoos are perched near Hellyer’s grave when the narrator visits, and they rise together in affirmation — carrying his spirit away, as Hellyer had been told was the belief of the Aborigines. A fine note to end an outstanding novel: the story as much one of place, and elemental continuities, as a yarn spun around a remote corner of Van Diemen’s Land. •
Cape Fever
By Nadia Davids | Scribner | $29.99 | 228 pages.
My Heart at Evening
By Konrad Muller | Evercreech Editions | $37.99 | 209 pages
