Fiction: Africa, battlefield and playground, is a place which drew, and continues to draw, all manner of villain and would-be do-gooder. It is the dark mystery, a land-mass most new arrivals throughout history misunderstood and, on acquaintance, continue to misunderstand, neglecting to acknowledge that far from being an individual entity, Africa, despite politics, remains a web of separate cultures, most of which have been traumatised by internal as well as colonial interference.
Few observers are as alert to the contradictions of Africa as the South African novelist, playwright and commentator, Christopher Hope, author of a previous eight novels, including the Whitbread Prize-winning Kruger's Alp.
He knows Africa as a native and also as an outsider, having left his homeland in 1973. More than anyone, he is aware of not only the contradictions that Africa inspires, but of the essential contradiction which is Africa. His new novel, My Mother's Lovers, is both quest and explanation, the story of a continent to which all-comers headed with a purpose, as the narrator, Alex, explains, "to build railways, save souls, speed trade and/or end slavery . . . they took out a patent on 'their' Africa and flogged it as the one true original". The result was, and remains, chaos.
Alex is the only son of a larger-than-life mother, Kathleen Healey, pilot, big-game hunter, eccentric daredevil, much-loved and elusive, an original whose travels and love life have spanned the continent. Early in the narrative it becomes obvious that Kathleen - who also boxed a few rounds with Hemingway, "though as she'd say, 'He was pretty far gone by then' " - was something of a long-distance parent with little idea of the man who had fathered her child. Alex does not conceal his unease: "I think my ambivalent view of her was no more than a reflection of her astonishing range." Here was a woman who was "never particularly South African . . . she wasn't to be confined to one bit of Africa". So this is a book about one man's mother, but it is equally a lively and satirical study of Africa as victim and ongoing enigma. Outsiders see it as one place, whereas it is a mass of conflicting cultures and languages and moods.
Hope strikes a Swiftian note of sustained exasperation and does not relax until all of his points have been delivered, sharply and snappily, in a narrative of great energy and not a little feeling, if no sentimentality.
Only a native could have written this, and perhaps only a native who has spent so much time living in self-imposed exile. Hope allows his narrator to follow his mother's travels and in doing so, he evokes her life and also that of Africa's bizarre experiences at the hands of many intruders. At the heart of the book lie some essential questions: is an African identity possible? What is Africa? How can anyone presume to define it as a single nation? Alex, the narrator, describes the position like this:
In my country we lived with bad air - with mal-aria - we had contracted the illness that was to lay all Africa low before long. We had the fevers, the sweats, the pain, the frenzy induced by infectious, highly poisonous ideas that were very much in the air: the purity of the blood, and the integrity of the tribe, group and nation. It led to madness and murder among us and it would lead to the same across Africa, as country after country came to independence. It might be called nationalism if that didn't sound too kind for a killer disease. The great disaster of our times.
This is a picaresque which manages to stay on the good-natured side of raging frenzy. Hope is an articulate, informed, highly sophisticated commentator, as well as a very good writer whose prose flows with sufficient ease to counter the barbed polemic. There is not a heavy-handed line in this slightly over-long, entertaining narrative which develops into a pilgrim's progress of sorts, as a son attempts to engage with the mother he never really knew. The story abounds with insight and historical references, all skilfully set within a conversational narrative. Hope keeps it light, but it is the whiff of festering indignation which fuels the narrative. For Alex, Africa is "the greatest show on earth" and Livingstone is "the first of its impresarios".
Alex's life has been dominated by random encounters with a parent whose approach to mothering was like that of a cheetah, staying with her child only as long as it absolutely needed practical care. For Alex, the personality of his mother begins to emerge after her death, through the various gifts she has willed to a select band of friends. In the course of delivering these legacies, Alex discovers more about her, about Africa and, of course, about himself and his responses to her personal legacy and his country.
Late in the book, Alex has a final delivery to make. He must find Papadopolous, or "Papadop", to whom his mother has willed her Livingstone relics, which "included one of the explorer's own route maps." Papadop, according to Alex, is a Zimbabwean citizen, but significantly, as is suggested by his name, was originally Greek. Later, Papadop explains to Alex the process of becoming assimilated into a place while also taking it over:
"Pretend to be liked, pretend to be home. When I first came to Africa there was British Nyasaland, German South West Africa, Portuguese Zambesia, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, French Equatorial Africa; the Spanish Sahara, Belgian Congo, Italians in Abyssinia, Germans in Cameroon. Some guys even dreamed of a new Israel - in Uganda. That was the time of the visitors: Asians, Chinese, Russians, Lebanese diamond dealers, Belgian priests, French colonials, British polo players . . . I think it's over, the whole adventure. Finished."
Hope brilliantly captures the contradictions and dilemmas of being African, and of being in Africa, a place that defies definition. His evocative memoir, White Boy Running (1989), written before the collapse of apartheid, told a great deal about South Africa and its place within Africa. This novel adds more pieces to the story and confirms that, for all the changes, everything manages to drift on in crazy, stagnant cycles.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
My Mother's Lovers By Christopher Hope Atlantic Books, 442pp. £14.99
