Son of SA comes homes
Raunchy novel has a serious message
RAUNCHY reading appears in alternate chapters of ex-journalist Neil Sonnekus’s first novel, Son, as a way of selling a more serious message.
Sonnekus’s father, who was murdered, is the primary character, while his dad’s fictional son, Len, an only child and a recent divorcee with not much other than sex on his brain, is the narrator.
“I wanted to write a memoir about my father as I knew him, but fictionalised myself,” Sonnekus told The Independent on Saturday in an e-mail interview from New Zealand, where he has emigrated.
“I mean, I’ve never been divorced – though my wife would say I tend to be somewhat divorced from reality – and I do have siblings.
“Also, I wanted to show as much contrast as possible, so if the old man was a puritan sexually, then Len certainly isn’t.
“Let’s just say I have a very fertile imagination,” he said.
His novel was set in South Africa in the 2000s, also known as the “Noughties”.
“I wanted to make as many people aware of the fact that 50 people are murdered a day in South Africa.
“How would I do that? By drawing them in, making them (hopefully) laugh, titillating them with sex,” said Sonnekus who worked at the Sunday Times in Johannesburg before emigrating.
Although the story takes place almost exclusively in Gauteng, it also brings in KwaZulu-Natal, where his paternal aunts lived.
“Every year we used to go down to my paternal aunts in Eshowe and Empangeni,” said Sonnekus, who grew up in Lyttelton (now Centurion).
Len and his father fit into different times in South Africa’s history: The son is challenged as he moves on from apartheid and the father must adapt to life after participating in World War II.
“What I didn’t realise is that my father had, because of his post-traumatic stress disorder, remained half-stuck in that period between 1939 and 1945. I wanted to move on – from apartheid, the transition, the perhaps inevitable rot, and see if there was anything new, better, different.”
Sonnekus said feedback had been unanimously sympathetic towards the old man.
“Not so with Len. Some people love him; some like him, with serious reservations; some can’t stand him. Same with his sexual adventures. I think this is excellent.”
He said the process of writing Son helped him get closer to his father, “albeit too late”.
“It helped me get to understand and appreciate my father, whose case is still ongoing, and I hope it will bring whoever killed him to me.
“That’s probably wishful thinking, but I would like to ask them what they were thinking to kill a helpless 89-year-old man.
“I don’t want them to hang. I want them – singular or plural – to understand that the person they actually killed was themselves.” Sonnekus wrote most of
Son in his adopted country, but returned to South Africa recently to launch it.
“At first I was anxious, from a safety point of view, then I felt perfectly at home staying in Parkview, Johannesburg. Everybody was friendly,” he recalled of his “homecoming”.
“But that’s not the whole picture. All those friendly people – whether journos or service staff, white or black – had work. Coligny (protests) was happening; a 3-year-old was raped on the Cape Flats and (President Jacob) Zuma made a point-scoring opportunity out of it, which is probably the most cynical thing I’ve ever seen.”
Sonnekus was annoyed to be asked whether South Africa needed another “white, male” novel.
“I mean, is there a committee that decides what South Africa needs? I am very, very allergic to committees, so I was glad to leave again.”
However, at times he had been happy with South Africa while following its developments from New Zealand.
“I was very glad to read about the municipal elections, in which the ANC was told in no uncertain terms that they cannot just rob their people blindly. I am not one of those South Africans who takes any
schadenfreude in, or justification for, leaving because things are going wrong back home.
“There is still a relatively free press too, so it’s not at all bad. But I think the big struggle is to decide what we are.
“Do we go with a barbaric personality cult, as personified by Jacob Zuma (and Donald Trump in the US), or do we go with a cult of reason, which is what democracy really is?
“At the moment it looks like the former is in the ascendant, worldwide.”
He said New Zealand had its own identity problems.
“One of them is that whites still cling to the skirts of the British Empire. This means they are so restrained, so politically correct, they end up not having a strong opinion about anything.
“They take passive aggression to all-new middles.
“There is not a night that goes by that there isn’t a cute story of one of Prince William’s brats having a tantrum or whatever on TV. It drives me nuts.
“On the other hand, just when Kiwi politics couldn’t get more boring, suddenly there’s a 37-year-old woman leading Labour and she has a Maori deputy – a first. Hello, it’s called democracy.”
Meanwhile, Sonnekus has already written a sequel of sorts, called Sotho Blue.
“It is in fact a ‘prequel’ and deals with my mother.
“I was surprised to end up writing so frankly and hopefully comically about sex in
Son, then I was surprised to write about a serial axe murderer in Sotho Blue.
“I don’t know what Sigmund Freud would say about it all.”