
Book cover: The equality of shadows by Charl-Pierre Naudé (Pan Macmillan, 2024)
- PenAfrican is Mphuthumi Ntabeni’s regular column for LitNet.
Title: The equality of shadows
Author: Charl-Pierre Naudé
Publisher: Pan Macmillan (2024)
ISBN: 9781770109124
The equality of shadows looks at the disintegration of the apartheid consciousness in the ’70s through the lives of several denizens of a small town in the Karoo. It is told, almost as hallucinatory, by a small-town reporter. Eventually, a symphony of interviews by those who were at the centre of the appearance and disappearance of a strange building in the dorpie emerges. Faint pictures from inside the building are the only evidence that exists. The real question is whether all this was real or not.
After writing his impressions of the interviews he had conducted about the incident in the ’70s, the reporter lost his nerve for publishing them due to several reasons: police raids, credulity suspicion, etc. He tossed the manuscript away. The author of The equality of shadows, Charl-Pierre Naudé, writes a foreword that reveals how the manuscript was recovered from a farm bedroom drawer in the ’80s. Because he was interested in publishing the manuscript, he contacted the original author, who distanced himself from the contents of the manuscript even though he was not averse to it being published. Naudé tells us that his only part was to edit the manuscript for publication. He says: “The Manuscript aims to be a documentary novel, and it was left behind on a farm near Petrusville in the mid-eighties. It was rediscovered in a drawer decades later by the farm’s owner.”
Anna is the protagonist of the book. Our narrator fancied her, but she was involved with his idiotic brother, Dirkie. Things unravel after Anna and Dirkie are caught semi-naked at the mystical temporal building that vanished. But for the presence of the images, taken by police, everyone would have dismissed the whole thing as a dream or a mind mirage of the two. Stories of witnesses are then collated to collaborate with or dispute the events of this preternatural day. The narrator was obviously traumatised by what ensued when he tried to report about the events of the day. For one, apartheid Special Branch police landed in his office and confiscated all his reportage material and images. He had to live by his wit in trying to circumvent the police.
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Almost everyone in the book, including the unreliable narrator, is delusional in their own unique ways. As the causes of delusion are revealed, we see that at the head of the hydra’s hands of delusion is the greatest delusion this country has ever undertaken: apartheid.
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In terms of genre, the book follows the style of Svetlana Alexievich, especially the book The second-hand time, where reality and fantasy glide into each other. The subplot there was to expose the atrocities of communism. Naudé’s is the exposure of apartheid absurdities. The books do this by telling the life stories of ordinary people whose commonality is stark in the backyards of our country. Though not aware of the real politics of the country, they have an inkling that they are living through the eye of the storm of national political upheavals.
The interviews are written in a story-like manner that reveals not just the emotional truths of the interviewed subjects, but the murky waters of not just the events, but the tricks of memory that always want to collaborate with the present understanding of the narrator. More interesting still is the fact that the subjects are more consumed with the telling of their consuming passions than with what happened that strange day. This, more than anything, makes the novel a history of manners. Alexievich’s The second-hand time ends with a story titled “Notes from an every woman”, where a character like Anna of The equality of shadows says: “Out here, we live the same way we’ve always lived. Whether it’s socialism or capitalism.” You’ll need to visit the small Karoo town to understand how prescient this statement is for the small Karoo towns also. Almost everyone in the book, including the unreliable narrator, is delusional in their own unique ways. As the causes of delusion are revealed, we see that at the head of the hydra’s hands of delusion is the greatest delusion this country has ever undertaken: apartheid.
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The tone of the book is poetic in quiet ways of lived and tested traditional modes of linguistic expression. That the observational attentive power extends to spatial and building architecture, is a pleasing bonus for me.
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The structure of combined individual monologues in the books may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but the tea in The equality of shadows is poured out through a strainer of distant humour, poignant pathos and affecting disillusionment that reminded me of the writings of Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez in One hundred years of solitude. It helps a lot that Naudé’s writing style is attentive to the language and nuances of native speech. The tone of the book is poetic in quiet ways of lived and tested traditional modes of linguistic expression. That the observational attentive power extends to spatial and building architecture, is a pleasing bonus for me.
Sadly, at the end, Naudé commits the cardinal sin of overintruding on the story by writing an unwarranted appendix. I wish he had learned the valuable lesson from Alexievich of allowing the story to stand on its own merits. I saw no need for trying to convince the reader about the merits of Kleinschmidt’s (the policeman accused of real apartheid atrocities in Port Elizabeth) daughter’s mea culpas at the TRC. Stories that are based on real fact are tricky enough, without the author trying to implicate their opinions on them, especially when those stories involve tragic, hurtful actions toward other people. Naudé tarnished his neutral authority as the author of the story in doing that. Prioritising personal experience and emotional truth over mere facts might be important, but it should never trump the victim’s demands for justice, or justifiable anger, no matter how repentant the perpetrator or his progeny might feel. The judgement of the authenticity of repentance is the victim’s prerogative, and God’s if you believe in an all-seeing, prescient entity. The author, of fiction nogal, has no business delving into that. But for the small part at the end, the book is well thought out and a beautiful accomplishment of mystery, thriller, fantasy and historical fact.
Also read:
Die ongelooflike onskuld van Dirkie Verwey: ’n onderhoud met Charl-Pierre Naudé
Moederland: Nine daughters of South Africa by Cato Pedder: a book review