BOOK REVIEW: Power Play
by David Gorin,
2015-11-06 05:30:27.0
ALMOST immediately into Power Play, the characters’ names strike an unusual chord: Tamora, Titus, Lavinia — these are mongrelised, even for the Cape Flats. Realisation dawns that author Mike Nicol has modelled Power Pay closely on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. It’s an insightful proposition, parallelling Rome’s crumbling civilisation with SA today: corrupt, fractious, a societal tinderbox as morality unhinges to the extent that citizens literally feed upon one another — a grisly scene in the play, and captured in the novel too.
The surface story line is straightforward: an internecine conflict for control of perlemoen poaching and its upstream supply chain. Behind the scenes — the overarching inference of the book’s title — ominous forces of political machination are colliding, as alliances between government agencies and malevolent Chinese business influences manipulate the gang battles. Cape Town’s searing summer heat symbolises the boiling churn of impending violence. When it explodes, it triggers a cycle of revenge and macabre cruelty, escalating into a war of gangland succession and amped-up, over-reaching ambition.
Unusually, this is a crime novel without a flawed, driven detective or heroic policeman. Instead, the murderous violence serves the purpose of business and political control, and so the forces of the state are higher up: enigmatic spies and spymasters.
Academic Leon de Kock points out that crime fiction in SA has mutated into a form of political discourse. But crime genre readers want page turners. Broadly, Nicol achieves this with Power Play, although full-throttle bursts of febrile frenzy are followed by lulls.
The sweep of Cape Town’s diverse locales and fragmented geography also calms the pace. Nicol has created thug chauffeur Black Aron to replicate Shakespeare’s bloodthirsty Aaron; his driving is a metaphor for the wheels of evil in motion, turning inexorably. Eventually, Black Aron gets his just desserts, as did Titus Andronicus.
The novel’s abrasive brutality is accentuated by the blunt, stark third-person narrative voice, mangled syntax and minimised punctuation, which creates a juddering, staccato rhythm. This gritty style is augmented through the stream-of-consciousness first person narrative lens of gangster Hardlife Macdonald, whose role is to explain the bloodshed being enacted on the streets.
Indeed, the Cape Flats gang violence is authentically captured. But Nicol misses an opportunity to enhance realism by delving deeper; the Chinese businessmen are sterile, and the intricacies of abalone smuggling and its links to drugs and international criminality are not explored. The research depth provided by other local crime novelists, such as Deon Meyer and Margie Orford, is missing.
In his previous books, Nicol’s protagonist, Mace Bishop, neatly sidestepped the cop stereotype. A security specialist with a black partner and a complex history as an arms supplier to liberation fighters, he had authenticity and gravitas. The same can’t be said for Nicol’s heroine in Power Play, Bishop’s daughter Krista. She’s taken over her father’s company, but doesn’t have Mace’s cynicism or intuition for danger. Nicol doesn’t imbue her with credibility as a security expert, and her motivations are vague. Belatedly, a desire emerges to avenge her partner’s death at the hands of a military intelligence assassin.
Instead, the core intrigue is provided by superspy Mart Velaze, who shifts from the shadows of previous instalments to take a pivotal role in Power Play. But he remains embryonic, underdeveloped in personality.
A pessimistic blood-tragedy with a solid premise, unfortunately Power Play’s denouement is feeble, irresolute and unsatisfying. Having nearly given away the climactic outcome in the book’s prelude, a huge twist would, at least, be the spike in the cocktail.
Picture: THINKSTOCK
ALMOST immediately into Power Play, the characters’ names strike an unusual chord: Tamora, Titus, Lavinia — these are mongrelised, even for the Cape Flats. Realisation dawns that author Mike Nicol has modelled Power Pay closely on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. It’s an insightful proposition, parallelling Rome’s crumbling civilisation with SA today: corrupt, fractious, a societal tinderbox as morality unhinges to the extent that citizens literally feed upon one another — a grisly scene in the play, and captured in the novel too.
The surface story line is straightforward: an internecine conflict for control of perlemoen poaching and its upstream supply chain. Behind the scenes — the overarching inference of the book’s title — ominous forces of political machination are colliding, as alliances between government agencies and malevolent Chinese business influences manipulate the gang battles. Cape Town’s searing summer heat symbolises the boiling churn of impending violence. When it explodes, it triggers a cycle of revenge and macabre cruelty, escalating into a war of gangland succession and amped-up, over-reaching ambition.
Unusually, this is a crime novel without a flawed, driven detective or heroic policeman. Instead, the murderous violence serves the purpose of business and political control, and so the forces of the state are higher up: enigmatic spies and spymasters.
Academic Leon de Kock points out that crime fiction in SA has mutated into a form of political discourse. But crime genre readers want page turners. Broadly, Nicol achieves this with Power Play, although full-throttle bursts of febrile frenzy are followed by lulls.
The sweep of Cape Town’s diverse locales and fragmented geography also calms the pace. Nicol has created thug chauffeur Black Aron to replicate Shakespeare’s bloodthirsty Aaron; his driving is a metaphor for the wheels of evil in motion, turning inexorably. Eventually, Black Aron gets his just desserts, as did Titus Andronicus.
The novel’s abrasive brutality is accentuated by the blunt, stark third-person narrative voice, mangled syntax and minimised punctuation, which creates a juddering, staccato rhythm. This gritty style is augmented through the stream-of-consciousness first person narrative lens of gangster Hardlife Macdonald, whose role is to explain the bloodshed being enacted on the streets.
Indeed, the Cape Flats gang violence is authentically captured. But Nicol misses an opportunity to enhance realism by delving deeper; the Chinese businessmen are sterile, and the intricacies of abalone smuggling and its links to drugs and international criminality are not explored. The research depth provided by other local crime novelists, such as Deon Meyer and Margie Orford, is missing.
In his previous books, Nicol’s protagonist, Mace Bishop, neatly sidestepped the cop stereotype. A security specialist with a black partner and a complex history as an arms supplier to liberation fighters, he had authenticity and gravitas. The same can’t be said for Nicol’s heroine in Power Play, Bishop’s daughter Krista. She’s taken over her father’s company, but doesn’t have Mace’s cynicism or intuition for danger. Nicol doesn’t imbue her with credibility as a security expert, and her motivations are vague. Belatedly, a desire emerges to avenge her partner’s death at the hands of a military intelligence assassin.
Instead, the core intrigue is provided by superspy Mart Velaze, who shifts from the shadows of previous instalments to take a pivotal role in Power Play. But he remains embryonic, underdeveloped in personality.
A pessimistic blood-tragedy with a solid premise, unfortunately Power Play’s denouement is feeble, irresolute and unsatisfying. Having nearly given away the climactic outcome in the book’s prelude, a huge twist would, at least, be the spike in the cocktail.
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