Eve's Alexandria

Car Wreck

It has been a few weeks now since the last meeting of my work book group.  My reticence can be partly blamed on my latest archives assignment (just three to go now!) and partly on the subject of discussion itself.  Crash by JG Ballard was a difficult book to read, a difficult book to talk about and, I anticipate, a difficult book to write about.  The controversial subject matter is well-known. A television producer called James Ballard becomes sexually fixated on the injuries and deaths of car-crash victims after surviving a collision of his own.  During the course of the novel he meets several other similar obsessed people: Vaughan, a veteran of motorway pile-ups; Gabrielle, a severely injured crash victim; and Seagrave, a rally driver determined to kill himself in an accident.  The story, such as it is, follows Ballard's descent into seedy underworld of car-parks, tunnels, expressways and overpasses, populated by prostitutes and cars endlessly in transit.  His friendship with Vaughan leads to his observing and taking part in increasingly depraved sexual acts, some of them involving his own wife and the widow whose husband was killed in his own crash.  The narrative is determinedly and unrelentingly vile.  Ballard (the author) injures, degrades and dehumanises his characters in every possible way.  Not a chapter passes without some horrible incident of sex and death.  One particular scene, in which Ballard (the character) and Gabrielle have sex in her disibility car is almost inconceivable and yet, given the nature of what comes before it, inevitable.   

The prose is mostly bland and deadeningly repetitive.  Ballard studs his text with a handful of key phrases and terms, so that every second sentence includes the words 'instrument binnacle', 'wound', 'radiator grill' or 'sex act'.  I found the experience of reading it exhausting, like humming the same short grating tune over and over again.  Just turning the pages was an emormous act of will; when I wasn't disgusted, I was bored.  By the end, I was bored even when I was disgusted.   The reactions of my fellow-book groupers were mostly a variation on this theme, although some were more extreme than others.   One thought it a completely worthless piece of trash, an exercise in controversy designed to impress readers simply by virtue of being shocking and repellent.  She felt almost too strongly to discuss it at all, and admitted that she had only skim read it because she felt obliged to do so.  It was generally agreed after this confession that none of us would have finished the book if we'd picked it up outside of the group, despite its brevity. 

Still, we were all compelled to examine the book's cult status and search out some meaning or purpose in it.  What was it about the book that had kept it in print since its release in the 1970s? Surely not just its prurient shock-value?   We discussed its moral implications, and talked about whether or not Crash was a cautionary tale, making an explicit connection between the coldness of technology and emotional poverty in society.  For example, in the novel Ballard and his wife  have sex while watching news reports about war and famine on television, so that a connection is established between arousal and pain or cruelty.  The ubiquity of these images is such that we become immune to their horror and and have to seek out increasingly visceral nastiness to illicit any emotional response.  Ballard's apparent inability to perform sexually without an element of woundedness (emotional or physical or both) is representative of the same immunity.  His psychosis is the symptom of a simple and yet terrifying boredom of his life, his job and his marriage.  His near-death crash is the most powerful, and real, experience he has had, and he is compelled to seek sexual satisfication in rehearsing it over and over again.  This is a potentially acceptable reading of the book, but I didn't find it entirely convincing or satisfying and neither did some of the others.  First, because JG Ballard himself has repeatedly warned against reading Crash as a story with a moral.  Second, because the narrative itself seems to caution against it.  The story is certainly about the way humans and technology interact, meld and conflict but there is no sense in which its characters grow or learn from their experiences.  If we read it is as a moral tale, I believe that is only because we are too appalled by the central concept - of being sexually aroused by death - to concede it is an end in itself.

We attempted several other explanations.  One book-grouper (the only one of us who had read Ballard before) remembered that Ballard had once said how surprised he was that critics and readers took his work so seriously.  She suggested that perhaps the book was just one big joke on us - Ballard is laughing at our sensitivity and our credulity.  We all found this idea interesting.  Perhaps the endgame of Crash was not to shock us, but to make fun of how easily and how simply we are shocked by something so patently ridiculous.  I must admit that I did laugh a couple of times while reading it: some of the scenes were so ludicrously nasty, and so disgracefully, impertinently written, that it did seem impossible that JG Ballard was serious.  But another member made the point that reading Crash this way, as a big raspberry in the face of our prudishness, didn't make it a good novel.  In fact, it made it a rather adolescent sort of novel.

I thought that if there was anything that could redeem the book it was its unreliable narrator, and suggested that Crash was an exercise in postmodern trickery.  The book is narrated entirely by its main character, Ballard, whose evident and worsening psychosis makes him a thoroughly unreliable witness of events.  He shows us a world in which everybody he knows, from his wife to the prostitutes he picks up in carparks to the nurses who care for him in hospital, are aroused by cars and car crashes.  Even their smallest actions, from the way they walk to the way they flex their wrists, confirm this to him.  Everything we know about their thoughts and emotional experiences is passed through him, like meat through a grinder.  Thus, it occured to me at the end of the novel that the whole narrative, and everybody in it apart from Ballard, is either a dream or a distortion. Vaughan, for example, is never a real sort of person.  He turns up wherever Ballard is, in surreal confluences of events, and the things we learn about his life beyond the motorway are often contradictory.  Similarly, Catherine Ballard's complicity in her husband's fetish is only ever asserted by him.  The infamous 'car-wash' scene, in which she has violent sex with Vaughan in the back of Ballard's car while he watches, presents her as a consenting party.  But I was not the only one to suggest that, if the incident did happen at all, it was just as a likely a rape, committed by Vaughan with only Ballard's enthusiastic consent.  By the end of the book her confused terror at her husband's condition is patent to everybody but the narrator himself.   The postmodern implication is so obvious it's clumsy.  If Ballard the character is 'making everything up', then surely it is no accident that he shares a name with Ballard the author who is, literally, making everything up?  JG Ballard once claimed in an interview that he gave the character his name to 'anchor the story in the real world', but I suggested that the opposite is true.  The main character is called Ballard because Ballard is foregrounding the basic unreality of the novel as a form.  Why are we taking anything he writes seriously?

We went on to discuss how shocking Crash would have been in the 1970s, and whether it has lost any potency today, and concluded that its shock value was still equal but its moral (if we were to agree it had one) is quite old and obvious.  Somebody wondered whether we were all so familiar with the idea that technology corrupts sexually because of Crash, and were unaware of its enormous influence on our thought patterns. We also talked a bit about how Crash wasn't really shocking or original at all and suggested that its central tenets were basically recycled from Freud's theories about the relationship between sex and the death drive.  Finally, there was some discussion about how the book had affected our impression of Ballard himself and whether it had put us off seeking out his other work.  Opinion on this point was divided, with some people swearing off Ballard completely and others interested in reading at least another novel in search of a more balanced view.  For my own part I'd incline towards the latter, but in a theoretical sort of way. Which is to say: given the choice of reading something else it is unlikely I'll be picking up more Ballard in the near future. 

Next month: Kazuo Ishiguro's story-cycle Nocturnes.

~~Victoria~~

Oliver Twist fights back

This month's recycled SFX review is of The Left Hand of God, by Paul Hoffman. A major marketing push (including what seems to have been quite a big mail-out of ARCs) means that it's had a lot of attention in the fantasy blogosphere over the past few months. Some of the attention - generally, I think, the more thoughtful - has been quite negative.

For my own part I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's uneven and a tiny bit smug - having one character appropriate James I's views on smoking ("a habit loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain" etc) struck me as a bit too Look How Clever I Am, for example - and its gender blindspots are depressingly familiar. But it's fast, involving, and on a sentence-by-sentence level pretty well-written; it's formulaic fantasy, but hides it well.

This review first appeared in SFX issue 192 (March 2010 - and no, I've no idea why the March issue has been and gone before the end of February, either...).

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There aren't many 400+ page fantasy novels you could gobble down in under two days, at least not with your brain engaged. Happily, this is one of them.

In an alternate seventeenth-century Europe, brutal wars of religion are raging between the Catholic-esque Redeemers and their Reformed opponents, the Antagonists (we suspect that isn't what they call themselves). In the Sanctuary of the Redeemers, a teenage boy named Thomas Cale lives a vaguely Dickensian life of unfulfilling meals, arbitrary punishments, and the sort of military training that would make Rambo feel inadequate. He has, of course, a destiny.

Left Hand has many of the trappings of 'young adult' fiction: adolescent protagonists subverting a confusing, hostile adult world; growing pains as a major theme. Still, there's a degree of grimness here that may be too much for younger teens: not so much the violence, which is pervasive but for the most part inoffensively cartoonish, as the central act of it that sets the plot in motion.

Despite the dark tone and the slightly fussy omniscient narration, which increases the sense of a nineteenth-century novel in genre fantasy form, this is an extremely fast, fun read. The writing is vivid and atmospheric, and the world as it unfolds is fascinatingly rich. It's often clumsy in its haste; some of the dialogues about religion are wince-inducing, and the female characters are all pitiable victims or attractive scenery. The romance on which the later part of the story pivots is also deeply unconvincing. But plot and pace are so compelling that it's easy to glide over these problems. And lurking beneath the surface there are some thoughtful depths about abuse, desensitisation, and trust.

~~Nic

Easterly/Westerly

Petina Gappah's native Zimbabwe is not just a country at odds with the world, but at odds with itself.  It's problems are legion: tyranny, hyperinflation, superstition, AIDs, corruption, to name but a few; and the causes of these problems are many.  Strange then that Gappah's award-winning collection of short stories, An Elegy for Easterly, should be at times winsome, ironic and downright funny.  As I read it I was reminded of the introduction to Doris Lessing's This was the Old Chief's Country (1951; 2nd ed. 1964).  In it she wrote something about another African writer who, when asked how he could write comedy about the injustice of his homeland, said there are times when you must remember you are allowed to laugh in spite of everything.  Of course, Lessing also grew up in Zimbabwe (or Southern Rhodesia as it was at the time).  I wonder if she has read Gappah's stories; they are so very different in tone and flavour to her own but, nevertheless, connected by a shared recognition of a destructive colonial legacy. 

 The first thing that strikes you about Petina Gappah's writing is its devastating simplicity.  How she uses the blandest of words to describe the worst of things.  Thus a rape is confined to two deft and powerful sentences:

He had followed the woman to her house in the corner, grappled her to the ground, forced himself on her, let himself go, and in that moment come to himself. 'Forgive me, ' he said, 'forgive me.'

When the rapist finds the woman dead nine months later after she has given birth to his daughter, the writing is equally as concise: Josephat found Martha lying on the floor on her back.  He raised her left arm, it fell back.  He covered her body with a blanket and left the house.  It is a style that lends itself to writing about atrocity, because Gappah knows that pain is more painful and horror is more horrific when we see it as ordinary and plain.  A flourish of writerliness dissapates the moment.  It reassures us that we are reading fiction, when instread we should recognise potential reality.  These particular events occur in the book's title story, which is by far the most complex and difficult (not to mention least funny) of the selection.  Set in a Harare shanty-town known as Easterly, it encompasses tragedy both personal - Martha and Josephat, and the increasing desperation of Josephat's wife - and general.  As the story opens Easterly is alive with rumours that Mugabe's 'slum clearers' are headed their way, with their bull-dozers, to destroy a community which is barely subsisting as it is.  What hope and affection there ever was has been steadily but not-so-stealthily eroded by hunger, unemployment and violence.  The house in which Martha Mupengo squats was the home of a man and his 'woman', before he killed her and then himself; the mattress on which Martha sleeps still shows the blood stains.  It isn't that Easterlys' residents ignore the murder, or Martha's subsequent rape and pregnancy by Josephat; it is that they live lives that force them to accept such things as events rather than as crimes.  They 'live to avoid the police'; and when the police do come they leave again without investigating, 'satisfied it was no more than it was'.   

Despite the story's content it is gentle with its characters.  Josephat's wife, for example, who has become obsessed with conceiving a child, and who steals Martha's baby as she lays dying, is a sympathetic woman.  Josephat is a miner, and away for long stretches of time, which she spends alone brooding over her barrenness, turning one day to witchdoctors and the next to the church for answers.  And Josephat, whose life is nothing but labour and squalor and an increasingly distant wife, is not a monster in the face of his actions.  They are victims of multiple criminal acts, perpetrated by governments, by neighbours, by themselves.  In 'Elegy for Easterly' Gappah is very clear: the residents of Easterly are not cogs in the machine of poverty and tyranny, they are not even part of the machine. They are just grist to the mill, and must survive as they can.

In many ways this story is unrepresentative of the volume as a whole.  It doesn't have the spice and fizz of humour that many of the others have; and it is concerned with Zimbabwe's very poorest citizens, when the majority focus on very different socio-economic groups.  Stories like 'In the Heart of the Golden Triangle' and 'At the Sound of the Last Post' are about women who live luxurious but confined lives as the wives of the country's power brokers.  The grieving widow who narrates the latter from her husband's state funeral stands on the same platform as Robert Mugabe as he delivers a eulogy.  For them the daily fight is against their husband's infidelities - the men all keep mistresses in 'small houses' - and the perceived impertinance of their maids; the fear that eats away at them is of disease, of HIV:

You worry because you have not found condoms in his pocket. You find yourself hoping he keeps them in the small house. You watch for the tell-tale signs of illness which crosses over into the golden triangle and touches your gardener Timothy and your security guard whose name you can never remember.  They both have the red lips that speak their status.  The only red lips you want are from lipstick but you fear you may have them too if your husband continues to establish small houses all over the city.

This is a world in which infidelity does not just mean betrayal and a breakdown of partnership, but destitution and death.  Gappah particularly highlights women's vulnerability in this regard: they cannot deny their husbands access to their own bodies, but nor can they deny them access to the bodies of other women.  They cannot, because even as they sit and pray for their health, they also depend entirely on their husband's goodwill for protection and subsistence.  Talk about rock and a hard place. 

Everyone understands the bargain that Gappah's women must make.  In 'The Cracked Pink Lips of Rosie's Bridegroom' the guests at Rosie's wedding recognise that her new husband has HIV: Disease flourishes in the slipperiness of his tufted hair; it is alive in the darkening skin, in the whites of the eyes whiter than nature intended, in the violently pink-red lips, the blood beneath fighting to erupt through the broken skin.  They are like prophets, seeing her death - She will die first, of course, for that is the pattern, the woman first and then the man - but at the wedding they clap and cheer and celebrate.  Are they complicit in her death, in her murder even? Is she? Or is it that there are no choices, and no escape when a woman must marry, illness or not?

Petina Gappah is most comfortable and adept, however, writing about Zimbabwe's 'middle class', the students, professionals and almost-professionals that populate stories like 'The Annexe Shuffle', 'My Cousin-Sister Rambanai'' and, what for me is the best in the book, 'Something Nice from London'.   These people are educated and ambitious, but trapped in stagnation by ridiculous levels of inflation and endemic corruption.  Escape is often on their mind, and emigration to Europe and particularly to the UK is a dream for many.  Even though it means an enormous outlay of cash (literally billions of Zimbabwean dollars), a collusion with the corrupt authorities and a future of poorly paid, degrading labour in the West, it is better than the nothingness, no-hope of their home country. 

Reading back over what I have written, I realise that I began by saying Elegy was a funny collection of stories, and have then proceeded to expand on its themes of injustice and pain.  Strange how this has unfolded with no plan on my part, but it is representative of the effect of the book generally.  On first reading it is, as I said winsome, ironic and downright funny, but this is just a shell or a disguise. It is disarming and charming, offering us a denial of the tender meat it covers.  Characteristic is 'The Mupandawana Dancing Champion', which tells the story of an elderly redundant shoe maker, Vitalis, who turns out to be a talented dancer.  He wins a competition in his home-town and gains the grudging, amused respect of the younger men, only to die during one particularly energetic routine while his unwitting audience cheers him on:

It was only when the song ended and we gave him a rousing ovation and still he did not get up that we realised he had not been dancing, but dying.

For Vitalis the dancing is two things: it is a joy, but it is also despair.  He dances because it is a gift, but he also dances because he can't do anything else. Can't work, can't retire.  In a very real way, dancing for him is the same as dying.  Which brings us to that old cliche: if I didn't laugh, I'd cry.  Petina Gappah has a subtler idea: laughing for her characters is the same as crying.

An Elegy for Easterly has an epigraph - a poem by Jane Hirschfield - that most perfectly expresses what I conceive to be Gappah's intentions:

More and more I have come to admire resilience.

Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam

returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous

tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on the one side,

it turns in another.

These stories, funny and sad, are hymns to the determination of a people to survive, and honest explorations of the moral and personal compromises they make in doing so. Petina Gappah is now in the process of finishing her first novel, which I suspect we'll see from Faber next year; it is called The Book of Memory and I have read an interview in which she says it is about 'the triumph of evil over good'.  I await it with anticipation.

~~Victoria~~

Reading Notes: Doris Lessing: A Proper Marriage

Here we are again, Doris and I, at loggerheads and in union at the same time. A Proper Marriage is the sixth Lessing book that I have read in the last two years, which is quite startling to me, as it makes her second only to Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen in terms of the greatest number of books read by the same author.  There is definitely something between us.  And yet everytime I embark on another of her novels I have to rediscover all over again what it is that I like about her.  The first fifty pages or so are nothing but slog.  It is like setting out to climb a mountain, and being in the foothills before the adrenalin and the views kick in.  I know instantly what it is that I dislike about her writing: the cold irony, the seething bitterness, the suspiscion of simple human actions of love and kindness and hope.  It takes a while for me to remember that she is also a writer of desperate clarity and fluency, and an advanced student of human character.  This last continues to surprise me, although I've read the evidence of it now over and over.  Lessing herself strikes me as all toughness and determination, not a person who is necessarily good at feelings; but somehow this gives her an extroadinary power of observation, and the freedom to say things about emotional experience that other writers simply do not say, or do not say so clearly. 

A Proper Marriage (1954) is the second book in the Children of Violence quintet, and thus the sequel to Martha Quest (1952).  It continues almost seamlessly from where that novel left off, as we rejoin Matty Quest in the first weeks of her shotgun marriage to Douglas Knowell.  After an uproarous honeymoon shared with the overgrown 'kids' from the Sports Club, nineteen year old Martha finds herself a virtual prisoner - both physically and mentally - in her new husband's apartment.  She wakes up each morning to an interminable drag of a day, waiting for Douglas to come home for his lunch and then for his dinner, before accompanying him to the inevitable sundowner party at 6pm.  At these parties she turns up her persona, becomes 'one of the girls', even while her daytime self fractures and flounders in apathy.  She is in a bind.  It is 1939 and she is far too modern a person to just be a housewife, settled into domesticity like a bird in a nest; but she is not motivated to find any work either, and so she just drifts about listlessly.  She has yet to find her purpose in life.  She reads a lot, often rather unhelpfully from self-help manuals which she riffles for soundbites to assuage her guilt and unhappiness.  She is desperate to be reassured: all marriages begin like this, all young women feel this way.  She looks about her at the marriages of her friends, and of her parents' generation, and finds very little comfort or encouragement there. 

And then there is the question of babies.  The opening scene of the novel finds Matty visiting a women's doctor for advice on contraception; she is absolutely determined not to have children, for two different reasons.  First (this is vain and flippant Matty), so that she won't loose her perfect figure; second (this is Matty's embryonic political consciousness), because the whole world is in turmoil and there is going to be a war.  It is a signal of Matty's divided self - the socially vivacious chit co-existing with the potential social activist - that she sees no ideological conflict in her thinking.  Still, it doesn't matter what she thinks: biology is destiny and Matty is already pregnant.  It turns out that the seed was sown even before the wedding, much to the disgust of her latent prude. 

After a short, brutal and naive attempt to burn and jolt the baby out of her (by taking scalding hot baths and then jumping repeatedly off a table), Matty's apathy reasserts itself and she watches at a remove as her body changes in the act of creation.  Sometimes she sits for days, smoking and concentrating on not thinking; at other times the firey, independent side of her is ascendant:

She was essentially divided.  One part of herself was sunk in the development of the creature, appallingly slow, frighteningly inevitable, a process which she could not alter or hasten, and which dragged her back into the impersonal blind urges of creation; with the other parts she watched it; her mind was like a lighthouse, anxious and watchful that she, the free spirit should not be implicated; and engaged in daydreams of the exciting activities that could begin when she was liberated... Martha reacted with a cold, loathing determination that she must keep brightly burning that lamp above the dark sea which was motherhood.  She would not allow herself to be submerged.

The 'creature' is born on the eve of war, just before Matty's husband ships out to North Africa, in a chapter which clearly owes much to Lessing's own experience of labour.  It is the most intense and wrathful of the book.  Abandoned in a side-room until the point of birth, Matty is literally torn apart by the experience, unable to remember who she was before the pain and unable to imagine who she will be afterwards.  It is a moment of pure egotism; Matty barely thinks of the baby she is about to have.  When it finally comes, after the perfunctory slip and slither, it is snatched away by the midwives and Matty is made to wait 24 hours before she can see her daughter again.  Lessing's disgust at this unfortunate practise is tangible; in a way, she appears to suggest that this initial seperation of mother and baby is to blame for everything that comes after. 

Like Lessing herself, Matty is puzzled by the experience of motherhood.  It is not that she is a bad mother exactly.  She follows the manuals; feeds Caroline the right foods; takes her for walks and puts her down to sleep at the appointed times.  It is just that she is a clinical sort of mother.  She knows what to do because the books tell her, and she does it right because she is an intelligent and resourceful young woman.  It is the intuitive, immediate acts of caring that she can't quite figure.  She doesn't feel the essential 'natural' emotional bond with her child that other mothers' seem to do.  She is quite happy to pass along responsiblity to other carers when the opportunity arises:

It seemed that something must have snapped between her and her daughter.  It increased her persistent uneasiness, which expressed itself in interminable puzzled humourous monologues: 'It's all very well, Caroline, but there must be something wrong when you have to learn not to care.  Because the trouble with me is not that I care too much, but that I care too little.  You'd be relieved, my poor brat, if you knew that when you were with my mother I never thought of you at all - that's a guarantee of your future emotional safety, isn't it?'

She rationalises her feelings as a positive detachment. The fraught relationship with her mother arises because mother is too attached and controlling with child; Matty will be neither attached nor controlling.  Instead she will engage with Caroline as little as possible, thus allowing her to grow up 'pure' without the pressures and expectations of love always bearing down on her.  Having read Lessing's autobiography it is clear that this was (and perhaps still is) her own philosophy of child-rearing.  As with so many of Lessing's ideas about interpersonal relationships, it is shocking to 21st century sensibilities.  At one point she goes so far as to suggest that it would be better if children were seperated from their parents from birth; it is the only way to stop the older generation from imposing their outmoded beliefs on the younger.  

After Caroline's birth, Matty continues to lead a double life.  She spends half of her evenings dancing with airforce pilots as one of the 'girls', giving in to frivolous youth and the temptations of Douglas' absence.  She takes advantage of her power, as a beautiful woman showering affection on vulnerable young men far from home and family.  Thus, alone in her flat with one particular pilot whom she finds vaguely unpleasant:

He had wept on her breast like a child - he had lost his nerve, he would never be able to go up again, he wished he had been killed when the aircraft had tipped over on its wing that morning.  Martha had cradled him, and felt such a depth of emotion that afterwards she could not bear to think it it.  It was terrible to her that weakness should have so strong an appeal. 

This is one of those observations that Lessing gets so right.  Matty is turned on by vulnerability in men; it makes her feel strong, in control, when in fact she is used and powerless.  She finds her husband repulsive except when he is suffering from his stomach ulcer and needs her to care for him; at those times her love knows no boundaries.  Perhaps this is why so many romantic heroes have a tragic flaw (like being a vampire for example, or harbouring a painful, shameful secret).  Empathy is sexy.

She spends her other evenings attending radical political meetings.  In Martha Quest Matty dabbled briefly with Communism before flinging herself bodily into the bustle of mainstream society.  Again she finds herself drawn back to the misfits and foreigners, unable to fully subordinate her awareness of the racism and injustice of the colonial society in which she lives.  As the novel progresses she moves further and further towards a break with the assumptions of her youth:

She burst out, 'I hate it, I loathe it, I wish I could take the first train out of it.  It's like a - Victorian novel. They talk about their servants at tea parties and say the lower orders are ungrateful.  They even go so far as to pay them twelve pounds a year, like our grandmothers, and say they are spoilt.  It's all so boring, things happen the same way over and over again.  And in fifty years' time, people will be saying about now, "How backward they were then!"  But in the meantime they fight and make speeches and write articles over every sixpence, and all the time with moral language, religion and all the rest of it.  What's it all about, that's what I was to know?  It's all so stupid and unnecessary."

This is Doris Lessing, however, and Matty is no political idealist (although she is surrounded by them at her meetings).  Oh no, she is as bored and cynical about inequality as she is angry about it.  At her core there is an ironic self-awareness: she cannot be passionate about her cause because she is not a passionate person.  She is a realist - about peoples' capacity for change; about her own capacity to care.  She may empathise with the pilots, with her husband, with the black majority, but she recognises that this empathy is, in some ways, ungenerous.  It is as much, if not more, about the way it makes her feel, as it is about the way others feel.  It hurts her that she is this way.  Time and again in the novel she tries to rebel against this essential quality of her nature - her ability to see and understand things, but not to feel them.  She tries to be a good mother; she tries to be a good wife; she tries her hand at acceptable charity, helping organise a concert by 'coloured' children for her white middle class friends.  It is no good.  Matty is simply not made for that sort of life.  When she leaves Douglas and abandons a toddling Caroline at the end of the novel, it is with determined tears to be who she really is. 

And who is she? She is as unforgiving as the landscape in which she has grown to adulthood and which she craves despite herself:

And why was it that nothing but the veld she had been brought up on, the sere, empty, dry vleis, the scrubby little trees, the enormous burnt windy spaces of the high veld, could satisfy her feeling for what nature should be? Dryness, barrenness, stunted growth, the colours that are fed from starved roots - thin browns and greys, dull greens and sad yellows - and all under a high, dry, empty sky: these were what she craved.

It sounds a harsh character portrait and it is. But there is no denying that, like the veld, it is also grand, expansive and heart-breakingly beautiful.

~~Victoria~~