FACE TO FACE
Shades of Greene
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`South Africa is no longer a place where the issues are black and white. Hardly surprising, that out of this landscape comes a writer whose canvas is every shade of grey in between.'
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IT would be hard to write a novel set in post-Apartheid South Africa and not deal with ethical dilemmas. Rather like Germany after the Second World War, it is a country struggling to come to terms with the fact that the overthrow of an evil regime does not entail the convenient disappearance of those who helped shape it, who strove to maintain it, who survived or thrived in its embrace. The new country is not a place given to easy sloganeering. It is no longer a place where the issues are black and white.
Hardly surprising, therefore, that out of this landscape comes a writer whose canvas is every shade of grey in between. The understated, rather dry prose with which Damon Galgut tells his tale is entirely appropriate for a story in which, although it certainly contains moments of drama, very little actually happens.
Described by fellow South African, Andrι Brink as a truly remarkable novel, The Good Doctor follows the unlikely friendship of two doctors — the narrator, Frank Eloff, and a new intern, Laurence Waters — stationed at a dilapidated, rural hospital.
Both Laurence and Frank are medics — but that is pretty much where the similarities end. Laurence is at the beginning of his career; Frank at a point so atrophied that it may as well be his end. Laurence wants to make a difference; Frank realises anything that they do is a mere drop in the ocean. Laurence wants to take the hospital to the people; to Frank, the concept of "the People", itself, is meaningless.
Laurence, shocked at the empty hospital rooms, the lack of equipment, and the ennui of the staff, asks Frank why no one from the surrounding areas comes there. Frank replies: "What do you think this place means to them? It's where the army came from. It's where their puppet dictator lived. They hate this place." To which Laurence responds with characteristic wide-eyed innocence: "You mean politics. But that's all past now. It doesn't matter any more."
The hospital stands on the edges of what used to be the capital of one of South Africa's many black homelands, created by the apartheid government, as the author tells us in a helpful introductory note, for the self-determination of its various black nations. When the regime crumbled, so did the flimsy logic of these artificial towns and boundaries, leaving them to fall into ruin.
"When I first got here I loved the landscape, the fertility and fecundity of it, the life it gave off. The smells and colours were powerful. But over time what had compelled me most deeply began to show a different, hidden side. The vitality and heat became oppressive and somehow threatening. Nothing could be maintained here, nothing stayed the same. Metal started to corrode and rust, fabrics rotted, bright paint faded away." Frank's description of the landscape is a perfect match for his inner state. His youthful energy has been sapped. His marriage has corroded beyond repair. The sexual liaison he has with a poor woman who lives in a shack and sells souvenirs to passers-by is infected with the desperate intensity of the marginal, the temporary, of those who live close to the edge.
The story of Frank and Laurence is strung like a suspension bridge between two powerful, shadowy figures. At the black end, is the Brigadier, the former dictator of the homeland, who was ousted and who many believe has been killed or exiled. At the white end is the Colonel of the army who moves in to the area to try and stop the illegal traffic in arms and drugs. By complete coincidence, Frank had served under the Colonel in the army during the apartheid years, and had seen a black man being tortured by him. Both the Colonel and the Brigadier are cold-blooded, powerful killers — standing on either side of a historical and a racial divide, mirror images of each other.
Galgut wrote his first novel at the age of 17, and has written four since including the widely-acclaimed The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs. Although a major literary figure in South Africa, he is not well known outside — at least not until The Good Doctor made it to the Booker shortlist last year. Reviewers rarely mention his name without some reference to J.M. Coetzee, either to dismiss him as a pale imitation or to claim him as a worthy successor. I would concur with still others, who hold that his writing owes less to Coetzee than to another surgeon of the human soul. In its understated bleakness, the inner moral torments of the characters, and the pervasive atmosphere of decay that seems to permeate people and places alike, it seems that the colour of Galgut's moral palette is not grey, after all, but a familiar shade of Greene.
ANITA ROY
The Good Doctor, Damon Galgut, Penguin India, Rs. 250.
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