Title: Ants in the Big Onion
Author: Annica Foxcroft
Publisher: Umuzi
ISBN: 9781415201466
Price: R153.95
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Broadly speaking, there is something curiously humourless, even dour, about South African literature. For a society to take stock (and celebrate) its multiculturalism, diversity and miscellany of voices, its banalities as well as its triumphs, writers must surely embrace the comical and light-hearted side of things to balance out a focus on the tragic and interminable. Yet the average reader (and by “average” I truly mean the man in the street) would be hard pressed to wax lyrical about local authors that successfully and consistently wring belly laughs from their audiences.
This brings us to Annica Foxcroft’s latest offering, Ants in the Big Onion, the third instalment of her Ants series. In There are Ants in My Sugar and More Ants, Foxcroft introduced readers to domestic worker May and her madam, Annica, and fleshed out their relationships with each other and a wild group of Meyerton inhabitants. In the latest Ants, May and Annica team up to run a B&B, the Fox ’n Zulu, where riotous and often ravenous guests repeatedly test their mettle.
Apart from May and Annica’s antics, Foxcroft introduces a construction worker, a brothel-keeper, a policewoman and shebeen owner, and German, Portuguese and Jewish cultural elements clash with traditional African rites and beliefs. We meet gender-benders, social outcasts, downright crazies and lovable misfits and we see how they come together around mealtimes and develop relationships. A lonely snake and an oh-so-cute cat round out the mix for good measure.
To reveal more about the novel’s characters would diminish the pleasure of getting to know each one of them in the chronological flow of events. Foxcroft generally exploits the comic possibilities inherent in a coming together of personalities very well, and from the opening pages many readers will delight in her playful, supple writing style and dialogue. Words like “lekker”, “donner” and “bliksem”, not to mention the ubiquitous “kak”, root the language in a welcoming familiarity, and Foxcroft tempers over-the-top moments with more subtle and intimate punning and banter.
However, it is almost inevitable that a novel so heavily weighted in favour of the outlandish and peculiar would sacrifice in terms of consistently plausible plot development. Ants in the Big Onion does eventually buckle under the weight of its comic intentions: it cannot sustain a level of credibility as it tries desperately to remain sincere.
Some of the middle passages in the novel in particular also seem to strain for effect, the result of one too many incidents that do little to move the novel’s action forward. This lack of synergy between the novel’s characterisation and at times frenetic action might well be the one major hiccup in an otherwise light and likeable effort.
I would recommend Ants in the Big Onion to readers that can look past the perfunctory title and jarring cover design, those willing to suspend disbelief in service of a genuinely warm-hearted, good-natured and mostly well-written frolic in the deep end of the new South Africa.