Praised local novel a confusing, unsettling read

LATE at night, Ella watches her elderly father on the verandah raging at the African sky. Caught between her mother’s mysterious grief and her father’s shattering wartime experiences, between the Holland of their past and apartheid South Africa, Ella fights hard to make it through her childhood in one piece.

Her one enchantment is her forbidden love for the teenage gardener Phineas. Years later, seeking political refuge in The Netherlands, Ella discovers her father never registered her birth and now she must confront her father’s ghosts and create a new future for herself.

Durban-born Elleke Boehmer has a list of awardwinning novels and non-fiction books to her name and is the professor of world literature in English at Oxford University. This particular novel has praises from eminent literary players including JM Coetzee and Ben Okri – which is what makes it even more disappointing that it could not live up to the expectations.

First, the writing style is unusual and mildly disturbing, written in the third person without reference to Ella’s mother or father’s name beyond “the mother” and “the father”. It is only well into the book that their names are revealed, almost as an accidental aside, yet there is no obvious reason for Ella to have so little connection to her parents that they do not deserve identities.

Then, the father’s character swings inexplicably – one minute supporting the Nationalist government and the apartheid system, with the racial bigotry endemic of followers of the regime, and the next writing a missive to the Russian president highlighting the symbiotic relationship he believes South Africa and Russia can develop, specifically in weaponry for fighting the terrorists. He is not without knowledge that the Russians were supporting the anti-apartheid movement in fighting the war.

Lastly, extensive energy is invested in detailing Ella’s childhood, only for the last 30 pages to cover the balance of her life from leaving school to adulthood and her father’s inability to have registered her birth – and thus prevent her from remaining in The Netherlands. No explanations are forthcoming and the reader turns over the last page with too many unanswered questions, and the sense that finishing the work, rather than finalising the story, suddenly became the critical element.

This book has promise and may well attract its own beloved following, but that grouping will not be mine.