Crooked Seeds, the sixth work of fiction by South African author Karen Jennings, hinges on a horrific discovery: a burial site of babies. What does it say that such discoveries are appearing in recent literature worldwide? Irish writers are penetrating the secrecy around mother and baby homes; American storytellers are finally reckoning with the Native American residential schools. But where other works dive into confrontation, Crooked Seeds, in its taut 219 pages, quivers on the precipice and presses a formidable question: does confronting these truths make anything better?
Jennings, whose previous novel An Island was longlisted for the Booker Prize, raises the question by plunging the reader into the life of Deidre van Deventer, a white woman in South Africa in the near future. Deidre is an alcoholic and an amputee who self-describes as “a f*cking cripple”. She lives in one of Cape Town’s cramped public housing settlements. Here, in drought conditions, residents queue daily for water rations to bathe with and consume. The novel opens as Deidre wakes with “the thirst already upon her,” and without the energy to reach her crutches; when she relieves herself into a bedside bowl, her urine is described down to the sensation, texture, colour and smell.
As an opening, it’s a masterclass in tone-setting. The novel proceeds in five parts that flip between Deidre’s perspective and that of her ailing mother, Trudy. In their narratives, mother and daughter mentally revisit their shared family past, but their memories, to paraphrase Jennings, are like shards that don’t quite fit together.
Trudy is happy in the delusion of reminiscence. She believes she’s being visited by her son and Deidre’s brother, the long-disappeared Ross. It emerges that she’s always been in thrall to her golden boy, will never acknowledge he was building bombs in the garden shed. Even the explosion that severed Deidre’s leg doesn’t tarnish her image of him. This kind of favouritism seeded young Deidre’s attitude of, “What about me?” As detectives question Deidre about her brother and the human bones in the backyard, the full toxicity of this attitude surfaces. It has become the “sickness” she wishes to cut out with a knife.
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But Crooked Seeds resists moralising and, until the final sentence, hope. Jennings is also a poet, and it’s her restraint, her fidelity to precision, complexity, and honesty, that makes Crooked Seeds impossible to put down. By novel’s end, we’re prepared to meet the horrors of the past with the knowledge that fairness is impossible, but confrontation is essential.
