Title: The red fawn
Author: Ed Razzano
Publisher: Europe Books (London)
ISBN: 9791220135023
February 2023
This reader impression was written and sent to LitNet on the writer's own initiative.
............ It is a fast-moving story that exposes family and societal conflict and divisions around every corner.The events unfold primarily in scenic parts of the Western Cape long after the euphoria of South African liberation has given way to the delusions of an advanced kakistocracy (government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state). ............
In his debut novel, Ed Razzano tells a compelling tale of love, lies and deception stretching across southern Africa with roots in Italy and Ireland. The title, The red fawn (Die rooi bokkie), plays on ambiguity in the Afrikaans translation, where bokkie (small buck) can also mean young girl/girlfriend. The rooi (red) in this narrative also alludes to the membership of Renata Gambini to the Italian radical left movement of the 1970s called the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades). Global politics are interfaced with post-independent South Africa, and forces of radical liberation encounter the darker shades of the apartheid military. It describes how the lives of two powerful women, who both lost their mothers very early, come to dominate the ruins of a dystopian world. Michelle struggles to survive severe mental illness and a failed marriage by embracing her criminal abductor, while the younger Colleen returns from her postgraduate studies in Ireland to uncover the dark truths about her mother’s fatal motor accident and finds romance in an unlikely quarter.
It is a fast-moving story that exposes family and societal conflict and divisions around every corner. The events unfold primarily in scenic parts of the Western Cape long after the euphoria of South African liberation has given way to the delusions of an advanced kakistocracy (government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state).
Women who have experienced a deep sense of loss due to the absence of or deceit by a parent, try to make meaning out of the confusion in their lives. Both Michelle and Colleen find themselves at the centre of a violent world often dominated by powerful, unscrupulous and wealthy men. To some extent, they are inhabited by demons linked to their parents’ hidden involvement or relationships that come back to haunt the daughters. In Michelle’s case, she is part of a dysfunctional family and at war with her male siblings. Colleen is isolated after the death of her mother, and unable to accept her Irish immigrant father’s reluctance to review the events surrounding his wife’s sudden death.
The males are often flawed characters who struggle to re-integrate into normal civilian life years after some traumatic events in their military service. Beatle, a former NCO, is on the run from the law, the past and his own inability to become part of society. He hooks up with Michelle, and, as a survivalist used to a precarious existence on the margins of society, he accompanies her on her terrifying odyssey. Both of them become incarcerated for their crimes and somehow survive. Beatle comes to embrace the “healing” and transformation presaged by a lucrative new church his crusading mother has founded. David Marsden, a former platoon leader who is responsible for the death of a soldier in Namibia during the South African Border War, leads a double life in the corporate world, until Staff Sergeant Du Preez enters the fray. The latter has reinvented himself as a mercenary in a security firm that carries out assassinations at the behest of those who hire them. He endeavours to silence Marsden from writing articles about apartheid crimes through his leverage over Beatle.
In the closing stages of this animated thriller, filled with action and winding turns, it is a beautiful young woman who takes steps to defeat the dark forces of evil. In doing so, she discovers romance amid the ruins of a broken society.
Razzano has engaged with a number of controversial aspects of historical and contemporary South African society in the telling of an exciting story. His insights and observations are striking, provocative, humorous and unique. While they make no claim to objectivity or truth and simply illustrate a different way of seeing things, they avoid what Eric Fromm describes as the narcissistic orientation in which “one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena of the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one” (The art of loving).
Readers with different views on history, ideology, faith and society may be challenged by certain events, perspectives and descriptions in this imaginary world Razzano has placed before us. While comedy and wit abound, it is not a circus. Many scenes are visceral, and characters endure suffering; but the audience will be drawn into the tensions and conflict, rather than being able to gaze upon a calm ocean rolling beneath a sunny sky.
