FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews The Dubious Salvation of Jack V. By Jacques Strauss Cape, 230pp. £12.99
JACK VILJEE has a good memory. He remembers his 11-year-old self, his fears and his dreams. Most of all he recalls the shame that chews away at his heart. “My family lived in a very nice house, in a very nice street in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg. It would be easy to get carried away about how nice it all was. If one isn’t careful one might easily sound nostalgic.”
There is little chance of that happening in this fresh, funny and candid debut. The South African writer Jacques Strauss takes the familiar step between childhood and adolescence but shapes it into something very special, dominated as it is by the narrator’s love for the family’s black servant, the generous Susie, who treated him as her son.
There is both stylistic ease and urgency about the narrative, which is unusually vivid and alive. Jack is the middle child, the only son bookended by a clever and righteous elder sister and an adorable younger one, the kind that gets thrown into swimming pools yet always floats.
There is a reason the narrator is preoccupied with the time when he was 11: it is “a memory vomit of friendships and forgiveness but most of all betrayal.”
Young Jack is the son of an Afrikaans father remarkable for his mildness and an assertive English mother. Because of this heritage Jack considers himself to be an outsider, culturally adrift. “I was not, as a child, entirely satisfied with the composition of my family . . . It would have been simpler, I thought, to be one thing or the other, so that when my English friends said something mean about Afrikaners I could join in without feeling guilty and without feeling shame that I was doing it for all the wrong reasons. Similarly in the company of hardened Afrikaners, I would not have to convince them that I was as much a Boer as any of them, that my blood was not tainted by a trace of those English poofdas.”
He resents his sisters. “Older brothers were glamorous, far more capable of inducting me into the world of men than my haughty sister Lisa.”
Jack tolerated his mother’s third pregnancy in the hope that it would produce a younger brother. “The only thing better than having an object of veneration was being an object of veneration.”
STRAUSS WRITES WITH poise and impressive comic timing. His prose is formal and correct; he quickly establishes a tone of laconic regret yet sustains a striking lightness of touch, particularly in passages of dialogue.
Jack is a dreamer, sufficiently romantic to gaze skywards at jumbo jets, “which I thought were so beautiful that they approached holiness”, while practical enough to have realised “that I would never be good at cricket or soccer, so I decided rugby was best, because what I lacked in skill I could make up for with brute force”. He is aware of the adult and racially mixed society around him: “Did I not live in a world where people were gassed and electrocuted and hanged and decapitated?”
The tension between awareness and innocence is articulated throughout. Jack is wised-up but vulnerable. Just when you think you are encountering a Bart Simpson, Strauss draws his prologue, an eloquent incantation, towards an unsettling profundity: “When I was eleven I didn’t know that it was the last time I could lose myself completely in games of the imagination, where something was what it was by virtue of the fact that I said, ‘This thing is such-and-such . . . let’s play.’ ”
Jack imagines himself as a mighty male and then admits he is puny and not very good at masturbation. Petrus, a local friend, always wants the female role in their games and enjoys pretending he is a mermaid. It is Petrus who introduces the narrator to a copy of The Illustrated Married Couple's Guide to Better Love Making. Its content causes Jack to walk home in a daze. "Pre-adolescents were not designed for this quality of frank and anatomically accurate information."
His family has a pool, and several small dramas take place in it and by it. Strauss evokes the ordinary suburban South Africa the rest of the world rarely sees.
This is a shrewd book; the political realities are there, albeit those prevailing in 1989. The description of the crazed history teacher, a top-class sprint hurdler denied her chance at Olympic glory, is hilarious as the narrator recalls her hard eyes as well as her toned body.
It does no disservice to Strauss to say this highly enjoyable novel reads more as inspired memoir, so adroit is the telling. It is as if Jack has sat down and, confident of our attention, wants to place his dreadful mistake, the misdeed that shapes the narrative, in context. It is, above all, rich in symbols and subtexts, not least among them a deadly black mamba snake. When bested by Susie’s son, Jack expects to be obeyed because “I was white and Percy was black”.
Early in the narrative, as Jack battles his fledging sexual urges, he recalls the weeks during which his family waited for the death of his grandmother. The old lady’s leave-taking is conducted at a leisurely pace.
“Watching my grandmother and my father I learnt something about how the friendship between a son and his mother developed over time. At some point, I concluded, there was a shift so that it resembled more the relationship between a husband and a wife. As the mother aged so too the son grew into his father.”
The salvation of the title refers to several layers of painful understanding. A very obvious crime occurs in the book, but the real evil is far more simple, hurtful and enduring.
Jack is a convincing narrator, and, in Susie, Strauss has created an unforgettable character in an engaging family story of unexpected moral complexity.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
