Earlier this month I was interviewed by Alan Morrissey for his “In Focus” programme on Clare FM. It was a follow-up on a previous much shorter interview in August about my novel, “Beyond The Fever Trees”, but Alan’s interest was evidently piqued by my somewhat desultory life. I jokingly remarked that it was for the purposes of cross-examination.
Alan’s open and honest curiosity meant that of the forty five-odd minutes we chatted about ten minutes were devoted to the book, and the rest to a (sympathetic but quite forensic) dissection of my life, which even I find somewhat off-piste. This was mostly my doing, because his line of questioning led me into areas of memory, consciousness, conscience, that I have sometimes let lie dormant. I suppose once you hit seventy you are allowed to indulge in a little retrospection, and my conversation with Alan provided me with an opportunity to do that.
It was a salutary exercise for one who presumes to be a writer, one who aims to be read by people he hopes will be drawn in by his writing. Beyond The Fever Trees is a war story, meant to immerse the reader in the realities of guerrilla warfare in all its nastiness and tragedy. It is also a novel about people, both ordinary and uncommon who find themselves forced to respond to extraordinary circumstances and events. It’s a long time since I studied literary theory at Wits University in South Africa, but after forty-odd years I’m still seduced by Mathew Arnold’s argument that a book is a reflection of the writer’s personality. The question is, how much? Is the novel a reflection of the writer’s true personality or of his or her self-image. Perhaps it is a conscious, deliberate process, a conceit.
I wrote earlier about reading Alan Paton and Doris Lessing as a teenager and a young man. After my conversation with Alan on Clare FM, I tried to revisit my first and later readings of their books. At the risk of seeming trite, they were two conscientious writers seeking to explain to the world and to themselves, the enigmas that were South Africa and the country that was once called Rhodesia. Of Paton’s second novel Ah But Your Land Is Beautiful, Alfred Kazin wrote in The New York Times ‘What is best in this novel is the atmosphere Mr. Paton conveys of the sultry, brooding tension in South Africa itself – that “heartless land” as Kazin quotes from James Stern.’
Kazin captures something of the essence of those episodes in history from Paton. Stern was wrong; South Africa was not heartless. Paton’s beautiful land was the captive of a tragically deluded philosophy rooted in the biblical mythology of the Afrikaner Volk, the New Israelites, as they saw themselves. The Afrikaner republics were littered with towns with biblical names, Hebron, Bethlehem, Goshen. Rhodesia was the child of a commercial venture presented to the world as a child of the civilising mission of Empire, legitimised by Churchillian rhetoric and the demons of the Cold War. But it became through an accident of history, a land that a quarter of a million white people, mostly of British descent, called home. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War the British sought to permanently settle thousands of migrants in two African colonies. The cry went up, Officers to Kenya, NCOs (Sergeants and Corporals) to Rhodesia. And over a hundred thousand answered the call in the decades that followed.
I’ve learned a beautiful phrase since coming to live in Ireland; ‘Lost the run of himself.’ I think I nearly did. I was looking to Paton and Lessing to convey the sense of writers who loved the lands of Southern Africa but were completely alive to their tragic conditions. My beloved brother-in-law and publisher in South Africa, the late Paddy Hartdegen, perhaps a little tendentiously wrote on the cover of my first novel; “Landsong” is a uniquely African story that gifts the reader with imagery and insights, carefully and sensitively crafted by a writer whose love of Africa radiates from every page. I am not for an instant presuming to the same status as two of the greatest authors of the twentieth century. I am nonetheless offering the reader something of my experiences, my perspectives and perhaps myself, as Paton and Lessing did with consummate skill.
I will end now, before I lose the run of myself again, with a last thank you to Alan Morrissey for a penetrating interview, not just in the there and then, but in the days that followed, during which I went over what I had said and what I had not. And if so inclined, you can cross-examine me by following this link: https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1HkG9PEt9T/
You can find Beyond the Fever Trees at O’Mahony’s bookshop https://www.omahonys.ie/beyond-the-fever-trees-p-10657730.html
