FICTION:TRYING TO change your life is not all that easy; trying to save it can prove even more difficult, writes Eileen Battersby.
Adam Napier loses his job. Then, having failed to find anyone interested in renting his house, stands by as the bank re-possesses it. His only hope lies in asking his brash younger brother for help. Gavin has had his problems too, but is now making the most of what he can grab in the new South Africa.
Damon Galgut's new novel is outstanding, as good if not better than The Good Doctor (2003) which was short-listed for the Booker Prize and the International Impac Dublin Literary Award - and should have won both - but won neither. The earlier novel looked at post-apartheid South Africa, all the idealism, all the dreams gone wrong. It was told through the eyes of a cynic who sees his cynicism put somewhat on hold, if only for a while before reality takes over.
The Impostor continues that story; it pursues the dream gone sour which JM Coetzee explored so brilliantly in Disgrace. It is an important connection: Galgut is the writer most closely attuned to Coetzee's vision. His prose may not achieve quite the austere elegance, or the irony, but all the controlled rage is there, as is the courage and the pain. The Impostor not only looks at a man in crisis, it examines a society racing towards hell.
A dramatic opening sequence sets the mood of the narrative. Adam is driving through empty countryside: "There was a turn-off and nothing else in sight except a tree, a field of sheep and lines of heat rippling from the tar. Adam was supposed to stop, but he didn't stop, or not completely. Nothing was coming, it was safe, what he did posed no danger to anybody. When the cop stepped out from behind the tree, it was as if he materialised out of nowhere . . ."
The exchange which follows is unsettling, and The Impostor develops into an insistent, compelling drama, told in a detached third person, that moves from the past to the continuous present tense.
In Adam, Galgut has created a character, not quite passive, not quite stoic, a convincing Everyman, less at war with the world than in doubt with himself. He could also be seen as a metaphor for the new South Africa - either way, he is living the disappointment of it.
Hopeless, bewildered Adam is not all that political - he is too self absorbed for that. He lost his job not on performance but because of the new racial balance; ". . . it was a deep, cold shock to discover that the young black intern he'd been training for the past six months was, in fact, being groomed to replace him. His boss had been apologetic . . . telling him it was nothing personal . . . Afterwards, remembering this scene, what he felt most keenly was humiliation that he hadn't seen it coming."
Throughout the narrative there are telling comments concerning the racial tokenism at work, yet Galgut has a far more subtle touch than, say, Nadine Gordimer. Adam's life is in a mess; so is his country.
Losing everything gives Adam time to think. He decides to try to find the young poet he once was. Gavin wants to help, so he loans Adam a house in the country where he can write.
It turns out to be a wreck in a place where the new black mayor has asserted himself by changing the town's name from that of an Afrikaner hero, to, as one local says, "an African name that nobody can pronounce".
Having moved in, Adam shakes himself and begins to clean. He works hard and even tackles the garden, albeit none too successfully. But transforming the hovel pleases him. "The world shrank very quickly to the size of the house. He hardly ever went out."
Galgut is brilliant at establishing Adam's inertia; his sense of floating, almost running on the spot. As he confesses to a former girlfriend during a desperate late-night phone call, "I've kind of lost my way."
She is now married with two children and has no interest in Adam's plight. His cleaning regime collapses and the dust returns. "It happened more and more that whole days disappeared behind him without trace . . . Or he saw a fig fall from a tree, and it fell and fell without ever hitting the ground."
The poems don't come. But suddenly a voice calls him by a school nickname he hasn't heard for years. Adam is greeted by Canning, a man he doesn't know, yet who claims an old boyhood friendship. Galgut introduces another element to Adam's bewilderment. Canning is another winner in the new South Africa and he draws Adam into his social world which consists of a beautiful and obviously discontented black wife, Baby, and Canning's fragmented memories spiralling around a hated father, interwoven with ongoing talk about business deals.
Canning's offer of friendship comes packaged with intrigue. The conversations he has with Adam are strange.
Galgut skilfully conveys Adam's sense of never quite knowing what Canning is speaking about, while Canning is obviously dealing with his own devils. By contrast, there is a punchy edge to the dialogue exchanged between Adam and his brother Gavin who, though obnoxious, is trying to help. In contrast to the artificial goodwill being offered by Canning is the sincere, despairing kindness of the lonely neighbour who is brutally rejected by an Adam incapable of dealing with a real person.
A great deal is going on in this intense, edgy novel in which probably only Gavin and his semi-psychic girlfriend can react to what passes for normal living. In many of the social scenes, Galgut catches the resentment that festers among the white community, while not that many of the blacks emerge as angels either in a place in which corrupt deals prove the norm.
BAD TIMING CAUSES TWO OLD servants to be wrongly dismissed from Canning's employment.
Adam, out of a sense of guilt, takes the old couple in and contacts their son - the other boyhood friend Canning enjoys recalling. The son's defiant arrival results in a tense encounter and one of several dazzling set-pieces in a novel of uneasy power.
Time and again through the narrative Galgut demonstrates his genius for understatement. Here is a writer whose grasp of nuance is astute. In addition to Adam with his dreams and fears, his unease about getting older, his half-hearted satisfaction in comparing his body with that of the flabbier Canning, Galgut has summoned a strong cast of damned characters in a narrative which moves between Adam's inner thoughts and the harsher realities of daily events.
Publishing his first novel at 17 was an early statement of intent by Galgut. It also imposed a burden. Experience has broadened his vision and his understanding, making him a major writer worthy to be referred to as a kindred spirit of the great Coetzee. Years of theatre work has honed his flair for dialogue and his ability to convey movement and gesture. The Good Doctor is a fine novel; The Impostor, with its bleak balancing of boyhood hopes and adult regret, is a great one.
...
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Damien Galgut will read on Saturday, June 14th at 2pm in Filmbase as part of the Dublin Writers Festival
The Impostor By Damon Galgut Atlantic, 249pp, £12.99