The despair of searching for love

THE THIRD REEL

S J Naude Loot.co.za (R189) Umuzi

REVIEWER: JENNIFER CROCKER

ETIENNE fled South Africa in 1986. He packed his bags and left behind him an unfinished degree and a father who would never understand why his son was not prepared to do his military service.

He closed the door on a potentially promising future in South Africa and left for the uncertainty of exile and London.

This is not particularly a Struggle novel, Etienne could have fled any country where he felt discriminated against or hemmed in by his father’s expectations and this novel would still have worked.

The point is that a young man, who has horrible memories of a militarised schooling with cadet camps, whose father has shown his disgust at his song for his treasured book of the marvellous drawings of William Blake, has extracted himself from a life he didn’t want.

There’s a conflict that begins almost at once which draws us to Etienne’s character.

He is prepared to use the anti-conscription movement in London to try to find a place to live, but he has no real interest in getting involved.

Etienne, with his drum kit enters the world of squatters in London, he is shy at first and tentative, but he manages to meet the right men, to almost find his tribe.

The book begins slowly, but it does show Etienne as a drifter in search of something he is not even aware of.

He gets strange letters from his mother, breezy accounts of life at home, and they perplex him, but not to the exclusion of his search for what seems like an amorphous oblivion.

Then he receives another set of letters, sent from different post offices, letters that his father does not know about; and the layering of the book begins.

When Etienne meets Axel, a German nurse, he finds his great passion. Axel undertakes strange art projects, works in a children’s ward as a nurse. He is intrigued.

Layers of skin, layers of feathers, and a book about a film that was being made as the Nazis began their obliteration of art and Jews, and gays and the deformed, a film that Etienne becomes obsessed with tracking down.

When Axel goes to Germany, Etienne pines for him. When he doesn’t return, Etienne panics.

He finds he doesn’t really know the man he loves in the practical sense of surnames, postal addresses.

And so, without giving too much of the plot away, Etienne ends up as a student of film in East Berlin.

His plan is to find the last two reels of the film. He has already been given clues on how to find the first reel and has it in his possession.

He sees East Berlin as a chance to track down Axel, and possibly the rest of missing two reels.

SJ Naude steps up the pace in Berlin, and the layers of the story become more concrete.

Travelling from East Berlin to West Berlin is about surrendering possessions to be retrieved on return.

About levels of underground train lines that move over and under each other.

The East is above or below, the West is some form of sanctuary.

The search for Axel takes Etienne back to music and his drums, to making music that defies the ordered world.

Naude’s depiction of both sides of the Berlin Wall are far more compelling than those of London somehow.

Perhaps because with its whispers and secrets it nearly mirrors the man Etienne is becoming.

The Third Reel is a thoughtful book, and not one to be raced through.

It’s a wider story about love, hegemony, when the personal becomes political.

It’s about losing words and people.

There is a section where Etienne and Axel return to South Africa after the end of apartheid – they go for a specific reason, to find something with his mother.

Axel finds the strength then, to tell Etienne a truth that will change their relationship.

From a world where concrete is the defining frame around Etienne’s world, to a place where he softens, this is a blindingly good book about how we love and why.

It uses world events to fill the spaces between the eerily discordant notes of the late 1980s to the perhaps softer notes of the next decade.

Naude takes language and place and twists them into a vortex of knowing and unknowing.

It’s a story of the painful building up of layers and the tearing down of boundaries.

He seems at times to be taunting the reader, to ask them not to like his characters and then he offers redemption in a single word or sentence.

Part thriller and mystery, a story of becoming oneself and then seeing oneself undone.

This is a serious book that pulls the reader into realms that many of us are scared to venture.

Naude has written a masterpiece of literature with an end that will leave you staring into the heart of light or darkness. But, mostly looking towards the light.

It’s a story of the painful building up of layers and the tearing down of boundaries