Picture: THINSKTOCK

UP AGAINST the Night is a strange addition to British-South African author Justin Cartwright’s repertoire of more than 10 novels.

Written largely in oddly deadpan prose — the voice of wealthy English businessman Frank McAllister — this is a tale of lost innocence and the shattering of ideals and memories.

McAllister is South African-born, a descendant of the Voortrekker leader Piet Retief, killed along with his 13-year-old son and about 70 other followers by Zulu king Dingane in February 1838. It is McAllister’s yearning for his South Africanness and the image that he has of SA that brings him back, to Cape Town, where he has a seaboard holiday home. However, the SA to which McAllister returns with his Scandinavian wife Nellie and her son Bertil is just as violent and unruly as it has ever been.

Desperately McAllister clings to the country’s beauty and good weather — something in which he is not alone among white people — until violence and misrule impinge on his own home and his attempt to recapture his quiet, rural, South African childhood.

Details


  • TITLE: Up Against the Night
  • AUTHOR: Justin Cartwright
  • PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury

That childhood was ripped from his grasp too soon by his mother’s death, leaving a hole in his soul that mirrors the grander-scale trauma it is argued many white South Africans, especially some Afrikaners, harbour after losing political agency. It is interesting, then, that McAllister’s favourite memory of that idyllic childhood time is of an aunt reading Pinocchio, that tale of the devastating consequences of the lie, to him. Perhaps Cartwright is saying that the nationalist Afrikaner government of old treated its citizens as children to be fed lies and fairy tales?

"You can see this country as a kind of tapestry, intimately woven of beautiful landscapes and violent death. Some of the whites say that it is stimulating. At least it’s never dull here, they say," comments McAllister.

That is one of the more eloquent of his statements. Much of McAllister’s prose is static, giving the novel a plodding pace that picks up remarkably at the entrance of McAllister’s foil, his cousin Jaco.

Jaco is a bitter, out of control young man, clutching at community in a world in which he feels he has none. His irresponsible, selfish actions have even lost him his wife and daughters, and he lacks any real introspection. Jaco feels that life, or anyone willing, owes him a living and a safe place to exist. His actions have led to him having none, a fate he blames on others.

But, as wince-inducing as Jaco is, the voice Cartwright has given him is lively. When he speaks, the pace whips along, the reader enthralled in the same way as a horror movie audience.

Gathered with McAllister in Cape Town are Nellie and Bertil, along with McAllister’s daughter Lucinda, a recovering drug addict, and the two-year-old son of her new boyfriend (she is not the mother). The child Isaac inserts exuberant youth into the family reunion, but cannot mask McAllister’s desperation to belong to the soil that soaked up his recalcitrant ancestor Retief’s blood.

Then, just when McAllister and Nellie have married at the lovely Babylonstoren near Paarl in the Winelands, the violence that emerges daily in SA bursts on the scene, dragging with it the entire family, including Jaco. This, naturally, explodes the myth that SA’s undeniable natural beauty makes up for its violent menace.

McAllister and Nellie escape to a place that could arguably be described as SA’s polar opposite — Sweden. It is a place where McAllister feels "clammy and unwelcome and in some sense diminished", just like he does in his homeland, where, he argues, apartheid was born of fear.