The complex histories

“The act of representation is inevitably doomed to failure,” says Craig Higginson, who is seated across from me in a restaurant as we discuss his most recent novel, The White Room. “I don’t think that we could get to represent anything accurately.

“What do we know about the past? We just have memories that are dictated to by our needs for the present. We remember things how we remember them because of what we want to feel right now. We do not have access to the past. Other people we grew up with have completely different memories of the same event. All we can do is create fictions that become metaphors for what is real.”

In The White Room, which is based on Higginson’s play Girl in the Yellow Dress, the two principal characters try to love each other but it seems too much stands between them. Hannah is an English teacher and Pierre is an eager student. They are both drawn to each other by a gnawing need to fulfill their own fetishes.

“Narcissistic in a Freudian sense”, as Higginson puts it, Hannah has her own selfish reasons for giving in to Pierre.

“There are lots of levels of selfabuse and self-harm going on in the novel but hopefully what emerges is the complexity of us, of our relationships and our individual identities,” says Higginson.

Inspired partly by his travels to England and France, Higginson says that after his previous novel, The Dream House, which was a particularly South African tale, he wanted to write a book that was more global in scope. The relationship between Hannah and Pierre (a white South African woman and a man of Congolese descent) can therefore be read as a conversation between Africa and Europe. “Being a white person from Africa, she feels shame around that,” says Higginson. “She realises ... that he [Pierre] isn’t of Africa in the way that he pretends. He is but he isn’t.

“Growing up through the Zimbabwean war and apartheid gives us an angle on things, where we can comment on what’s going on in the world in a way that other people can’t,” says Higginson.

“Being a white South African, I can comment on whiteness in way that the average person living in Somerset, London or Paris can’t,” he adds.

A dialogic novel with a play running through the heart of it, much of the novel is spent negotiating who Hannah and Pierre portray them-