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The existence of poor whites makes South Africa a country that, say, Kenya could never be. I was once up in the dustbowl of the Northern Cape when I came across a town at a dirt-track mission crossroads. There was a sign for the old gallows, a derelict hotel and a small market-place. In the market sat a 70-year-old white man in a suit with his old coloured girlfriend/wife, behind a table on which were stacked seven or eight avocados. Their horse and cart were nearby. Maybe he was a half-caste. But Cecil Rhodes he was not.
This novel takes place in such a town, and concerns such people and their cousins: the sort of place where everyone still puts on their best clothes to go to the cheapskate circus that visits them twice a year. It’s John Steinbeck with anthills. As such it is an extremely atmospheric book in a hazy, raw and entirely realistic sense. These are the sorts of places where yuppies do not buy holiday homes.
Galgut’s story suggests that such points on the map, despite their ghostly quiet, are seething with repressed violence, ready to explode should the right catalyst enter town. Maybe he’s right, but these are not the Catholic tropics. They can certainly be intense places, but my own feeling is that they are more melting than they are exploding. Deprived of old apartheid subsidies, these towns are losing their children to the cities and their pets to the rooikats. Even if you were feeling crazy it could take you a day to find someone to pick a fight with.
But publishers like crime stories, even if they let good writers get away with whydunnits rather than any pretence at sleuthing. There is a mystery in this book: how do the semi-Calvinist inhabitants of this depopulated hourglass survive in conditions that would test a Buddhist monk? The answer is that they don’t really. They are bored to the point of surreality — Olympians of the loose end — and Galgut captures that mood extremely closely.
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