Here is my reading: Nicol’s analysis is similar to that of Marlene van Niekerk’s in her newest work and both are indebted to Deleuze and Guattari: the social body is so stricken by the schizophrenia of late capitalism and the orgy of spectacular consumerism - so split across lack and want, desiring and dying - that its behavioural symptoms have become morbid and deadly. ![]() It also lies in the form’s adequation to real social conditions, but short of an ultimate sociological analysis it all comes back to every reader’s reading of society, based on the available data. His characters are depicted with less individual interiority, less “roundedness” and more outward style within a Byzantine plot, because the political game of capital accumulation is a class thing: individuals are pulled into a game that is bigger than themselves.ĭoes this “click” for you as a reader? That is the real question and the answer lies in the reader’s hands. The answer to this test, in the reader, is a measurement called “recognition” or “adequation”.įor example, the style in Nicol’s trilogy is “hard-boiled” or “hard core”. In a sense, then, the real question is: how convincing is the depiction? And the test here lies in the question of form: structure and style. It depends on where you stand, what you want to believe and how you read the situation. Call it an incisive analysis that cuts through the crap. Call it a typical neoliberal kneejerk perception, if you like. Whether you agree with this or not is up to you as a reader. In Nicol’s South Africa consumptive greed is massive and pervasive. Money is God and the only difference between South Africa and any other global polity is the degree to which the pay-off effectively runs the country. ![]() The ideals of the Freedom Charter have been decisively sold out. The entire machinery of liberal democracy and black economic empowerment is here depicted as a fig leaf for a criminal accumulation of goods - essentially, late capitalism overrunning socialist idealism. More pertinent than the plot is the political topography of the novel. It is high noon in the Cape Town badlands of hired hit men, corrupt National Intelligence Agency operatives and dirty arms deals. Bishop, in turn, wants to kill her because she has murdered someone he loved. Sheemina is out to get Mace Bishop, former ANC operative turned private security consultant. ![]() Nicol, by contrast, is Elmore Leonard in a politically greased Cape Town - a Mother City where the dark mother, femme fatale Sheemina February, spins a web of political machination with appalling effect. Nicol’s novel reads with the same kind of racy pace, although his style is different from Heyns, who creates gentle social satire, a veritable Henry James in the veld. In contrast, a whodunit novel like Michiel Heyns’s Lost Ground is so gripping that I bunked a day off work just to get to the end of it. Some recent “serious” political novels, despite polite reviews full of faint praise, are quite unreadable and yet they contain excellent sociopolitical content.
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