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He lodges there as a guest, and then, when the COVID lockdown is announced, he arranges with the manager to stay on alone as a caretaker. He wants to be alone to remake himself in conditions of aloneness, of brief solitariness.
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Title: Merrydown Farm
Author: Michael King
Cape Town: Independently published, 2021
ISBN number: 978-0-62092825-0
When Arthur Buckly retired as a teacher, he left the profession he had been committed to and lived by all his life. Teaching requires a strict, regimented lifestyle, and with this now left behind, a new dimension opened for him and his wife, Evelyn, to live in. Along with this new dimension, he also had to understand better the purpose and meaning of life. The concept of his place in time is a strong feature in the novel – especially how he will relate to time, now that he is living out an unregulated existence. Urban life is good to him and Evelyn. They have a family: their daughter, Ruth, and her husband, Nick, who live abroad but come back to South Africa for Christmas to see her parents. Talk around the Christmas dinner table highlights how Arthur can chart his own course – now that he is retired. The novel makes clear distinctions between situations, evaluating the time-place continuum. For the moment, however, newly retired and with his family there, Arthur is happy. He is still not sure what he wants to do; he asks questions about what the future will be all about, but whatever it will be, he knows that Evelyn will be part of the new venture. He sets himself a new timetable – the novel creates the contrasts between the then and now; for instance, he has time to think about breakfast. He asserts that now he is a person of his own making for the first time, not someone tied down at the beck and call of others, even though he had a very senior post in his school. Activities such as gardening revitalise his soul; he thinks about the poetry he has read and taught, and this gives him some inspiration for his new-found time.
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He observes a cobra shedding its old skin and becoming new again – could this be a metaphor for creating a new identity for himself as a person?
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They decide to take a short road trip and go into the Karoo. Travelling through the Karoo gives him a new understanding of time, place and space. Space is a place in time. We move through space seeing ourselves and our significance/insignificance, but the process gives Arthur time to re-evaluate who he might become. The Karoo becomes a measuring rod for his existence because of its wide dimensions, which is very different from when he was teaching, where he was stuck to the timetable. Arthur observes the stars, how they make him feel insignificant because of the expansiveness of the universe and the distance they are away; also, the fossils that they see convey to them how far back in time there were living creatures that existed where they as individuals find themselves now. The space-time continuum, once again, is a measuring rod for our existence. Suddenly, their space becomes a dimension they look at differently. The visit to the SALT telescope gives Arthur a new pair of eyes to see things in a different dimension. They make a very brief overnight visit to a guest farm called Merrydown, which gets a few lines’ mention, and which they enjoy enormously. After that, they return home to suburbia and the routine of a retired couple living in their own house. An overseas trip is in the offing, along with the typical retirement pursuits of joining a book club, learning French and all the other things one does in the state of retirement. Arthur starts enjoying cooking. However, he starts thinking that perhaps all this is not going to be fulfilling enough for a person not yet 65 – working around his house, with his wife somewhere by his side. A friend suggests that he should engage in a big, audacious project. At first not too sure, he starts thinking about it.
Then Evelyn suddenly dies. The narrative takes the reader through the normal things that a death in a middle-class family would require to be attended to: mourning, sorting out the estate, sharing feelings and emotions with the children who have come out from the UK, going through the depressing processes leading to the cremation. Now alone, Arthur begins thinking of perhaps taking a trip, but summoning the energy to go on a trip is followed by the decision not to – what would he do without the reference point of having Evelyn beside him? He starts feeling unhappy in his isolation, and tries to set up a date with a past acquaintance, but it ends unsatisfactorily. He is still grieving, not just for his partner but also for his identity, which he fears he is losing. He juggles his thoughts as he goes through memorabilia, remembering his life through past relationships during his younger days as a student in Grahamstown/Makhanda. “He sat for a space of time in deep meditation” – more reminiscing of his life then, and also back to when he met Evelyn. Clearly, he believes that revisiting his past might allow him to reset his identity, which has been shaped by his life as a teacher. He goes back to the UK to visit Ruth, and on his return, he starts thinking of a trip to where he studied. Will that re-enforce his identity, will the memories do it, if he walks through those places again? Here, he might come to see people from the past, but “there are so many lives in between the time we knew people when we were young, and when we meet them again in later life”. Time-place-space. He inquires about an ex-girlfriend, Jane, an important relationship and a link to his past, but he is told that she died years ago. There are quite a few pages of engagement in the text around his relationship with Jane, drawing attention to the theme of the reality we are in. When it is gone, or threatened, how do you deal with the situation? A lot more is revealed about Arthur and the loss of Jane than one would expect from the novel. But it’s an important part of loss when we realise that the underpinnings of reality are being swept from under us. Jane’s death leaves Arthur more exposed. This is when he decides to go into a retreat by returning to Merrydown, where he and Evelyn briefly visited. The Karoo is a wide-open space where he can meditate and establish who he might be.
This is a turning point in the narrative. He lodges there as a guest, and then, when the COVID lockdown is announced, he arranges with the manager to stay on alone as a caretaker. He wants to be alone to remake himself in conditions of aloneness, of brief solitariness. Here begins his exploration. He is a tabula rasa on which he can rewrite his story. He explores the place geographically, establishes a frame within which to live his life. He discovers new ways, new routines, sees new things. He observes a cobra shedding its old skin and becoming new again – could this be a metaphor for creating a new identity for himself as a person? Similarly, he realises he is not alone on the farm, as the rock art images he finds speak of others who were there before him, separated only by time, because the space has never changed. Will this help him to find out more about himself, what to do, where to go, the purpose of his life? He gains further insights from encountering the stars in the night sky, the fossils all around him, and the rock art. Nature’s creatures also form part of the past and present life. He studies the behaviour of ants, for which he defers to the work of Eugène Marais, who studied ant behaviour. Then, in the midst of his solitariness, there comes to the farm an intruder named Emmanuel, a Zimbabwean who arrives from the nearby town as a refugee from COVID. Mannie only stays for two nights and then disappears, and Arthur is alone again, living in a semi-paradise-like environment – yet soon far from it, as the farmstead is invaded by robbers, who steal food and drink, and his Eden is violated.
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The farm novel also reflects the country’s realities, especially the economic imbalances which arise from political imbalances. Arthur is forced again into questioning his situation. What kind of imbalances must he look out for?
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South Africa’s social woes are brought into the novel: farm robberies, COVID, the plight of migrants. The farm novel also reflects the country’s realities, especially the economic imbalances which arise from political imbalances. Arthur is forced again into questioning his situation. What kind of imbalances must he look out for? Life is stable when he has an idea of who he is, but then circumstances change, and how does that affect his identity? What should he be doing to fortify himself, his soul? He continues his exploration of the farm. He continues to examine the iconographies of rock art, studying them, trying to find out more about how he perceived things then, and how he does now. The narrative problematises the meaning of art for us as humans. Something of the Gombrichian psychology of art comes through in several pages to assist us in understanding ourselves – like the snake in and out of skin. Do we exfoliate psychologically? If so, Arthur can get answers to his changed identity that way. But wandering around the farm is becoming oppressive and depressing. Solitariness is not working; he is descending into a state of anomie. Detached, lost, missing any reference point – not even the stars, fossils, creatures that previously gave him some shape. When he was teaching, he had an identity. But things have changed. Skin is a strong metaphor in the book; we wear it, we lose it, we take on a new skin. But how does this apply to Arthur’s situation – stuck away in this godforsaken, COVID-related time capsule? Ironically, he went there to find himself, to work out better the new set of circumstances that had befallen him – his new reality and his “new” identity – to rediscover himself. He considers embracing the concept of the group soul – the shared consciousness – that might shape his new existence. This realignment of thinking is, however, insufficient. Delirium and unhappiness set in, destroying his equanimity. He is grieving his loss of identity. He starts hallucinating, imagining things. Then, things suddenly change when Mannie returns. Mannie becomes his saviour, now a much stronger character than before, bringing Arthur (the fallen knight, armourless), back to some measure of himself – putting on new armour (skin)? Mannie recounts the social evils, the devastating effects of COVID in the towns that made him leave and come back to the lonely farm. Mannie dispels Arthur’s fictions of fantasy in the stars, the fossils, even the rock art: “[M]aybe we need to make our own painting here.” We are who we are, but how do we interact together? The author uses this image to underpin the connections, to realise our reality as people. Arthur re-evaluates his life through Mannie. This is the novel’s most poignant moment. After that, other realities set in. Intruders invade the farm again, and Mannie is shot trying to save Arthur. Mannie’s sacrificial love jolts Arthur out of his despair. The world enters the farm again. Arthur quickly ties up whatever arrangements need to be made for him to leave the farm, and then sets off, not back to Cape Town, but to Makhanda, where he started this journey, now better equipped to address the question of his identity – how to deal with life when its underpinnings have been swept away.