Cover: Jonathan Ball
This reader’s impression was written and sent to LitNet on the writer's own initiative.
The lucky ones
Alistair Mackay
Jonathan Ball
ISBN: 9780795710162
Short stories are a whole different ball game. This is often where you find out how good or even great a writer truly is – how they manage to weld form and content, structure and theme together into a power-packed combination that says something urgent, necessary or disarming about the world. Sometimes it’s the world we live in now. Sometimes it’s the never-dead past. Sometimes it’s a future not yet born or one struggling to come fully into being. One thing is certain: The short stories that matter and that remain memorable and essential over time know how to say important, vital things without wasting a single word.
Alistair Mackay’s debut It doesn’t have to be this way and follow-up The child are both so formally impressive and beautifully written that you’d be forgiven for being more than a little jealous. He is the kind of new generation author armed with uncanny insights into the world we live in now. Current anxieties, fears, uncertainties, kinds of inequality and myriad forms of violence become a springboard to imagine both the present and the future, where it is nothing less than essential that we find better, more fitting, more egalitarian and sustainable ways of living together and loving both those similar and those different to ourselves.
Mackay may have a true knack for the speculative and a keen interest in pressing issues like the climate crisis, global anxieties around technology and especially artificial intelligence, and diminishing resources. However, I’d argue that he is even more interested in the ways that late capitalism and our absolute overreliance on machines and screens have harmed, hurt and warped the ways we imagine and practise intimacy with our own bodies and the bodies of others.
In short, I think Mackay might be the authoritative voice – turning his keenly felt own anxieties and uncertainties about this stricken time inward and outward – writing about the need for new, more accommodating intellectual, spiritual and especially physical communities. He’s no romance novelist – far from it – but all his work is about the work of genuine, radical love, forms of acceptance and the diversification and forging of homely and truly welcoming spaces and realms of solidarity across the racial, gender and class divides.
I won’t belabour the point too much, but it has to be said that Mackay manages – often very subtly and ingeniously – to transcend the labels of queer literature, speculative fiction and green writing. He offers a wholly distinct and entirely convincing blend of very clever, astute and affectively powerful fictions that feel awfully high on the truth value scale.
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The lucky ones, the author’s debut short story collection, is both astoundingly ambitious and highly polished.
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The lucky ones, the author’s debut short story collection, is both astoundingly ambitious and highly polished. There’s readability, momentum and sheen that speaks to incredible narrative craft and no doubt a substantial amount of revisional sharpening. The writing cuts across centuries, explores entirely divergent landscapes, introduces a huge cast of finely drawn and memorable characters, and floats from Johannesburg and Cape Town to the Tsitsikamma and New York.
Mackay might be one for the stripped down and cogent, but he’s unafraid to let a story and characters dictate a pace that is leisurely, or themes that are wide-ranging and even entirely unexpected (in a single story, no less). He allows the reader to be confronted with massively claustrophobic, all-too-real forms of violence, deprivation, political and communal conflict, and especially unsettling intimacies, coupled with self-discovery.
The lucky ones – with an eponymous 20-pager of a short story featured third in the collection – holds up a cracked mirror to a variety of fully imagined lives. I’m wary of playing spoilers with too much attention given to individual stories, but there’s an admirable heft, cohesion, sensuality and even playfulness despite serious subject matter that emerges in the titular tale and in “The king of the jungle”, “Going home”, “Kingdom of prophets”, “Three readings” and “You can’t stay here”. Not to mention one of my favourite favourites, “Why don’t South Africans read fiction?”, which engages this pressing issue with both wit and seriousness.
Some of these stories are relentlessly grim and politically charged, with others managing a deftness and lightness of touch while ultimately hitting you right in the solar plexus. What stands out across the material is Mackay’s insistence on making a mockery of the idea of cultural appropriation and of being trepidatious in tackling the stories and interior lives of others who aren’t white, male and relatively privileged.
The author writes not as a distanced observer, but as an intimate observer and someone with deep empathy about struggles and conflicts that are important and relevant to the people of this country and abroad. His writing is not a speaking for, not an arrogant appropriation, not a claim to full and inviolable knowledge and understanding; rather, he writes as a curious, deeply kind and morally courageous citizen of the world, coming to terms with the quotidian realities of a sometimes unforgiving and rapacious social order.
Bloody hell, but Mackay writes bodies well. These characters feel and experience deeply and profoundly, and are not removed from their bodies in the way that they make sense of their dislocating and defamiliarising experiences, even of deeply familiar spaces, places and people. These pages are marked by lived, embodied experience: Many characters stain, bleed onto and express desires like real people would – not as intellectually cold and clinical test subjects, performing ideas about uncomfortable and contested ways of living.
Ultimately, this collection is about luck, about how your place in the world is more than just a cosmic accident, and about how you can never, ever outrun your history or fate. Who knows what these characters’ often terrible luck might have saved them from, in terms of even worse luck (to paraphrase Cormac McCarthy)?
To what extent is it possible to escape from the established social order and prevailing orthodoxies around race, class and gender, in order to create a new social contract – partial, incomplete and provisional as it may be?
The lucky ones is one of the best local short story collections of the decade. It is no less than compulsory reading, a book that might very well have a marked impact on the fictional landscape in this country as a whole.
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