S African author’s fine novel haunted by death
GREEN Lion, by South African novelist Henrietta RoseInnes, is a strange novel. While starkly different to Patrick Suskind’s Perfume‚ both novels are morbid‚ haunted by death and the desire to distil that left over after death – memory‚ pain‚ loss‚ smell.
“He wrinkled his nose‚ conscious of blood and bone‚ urine. He peered through the bars and at first saw nothing‚ just a pulsing blackness …”
This is fiction at its most intimate‚ in which thoughts‚ yearnings‚ confusions and despair secrete themselves on to the page. If grief is the trigger – a girl-child killed in the forest‚ a beloved mauled in a lion cage‚ an absent father who like a poltergeist fills “the holes where memories should be” – an absence “distributed around the house like unexpected air pockets” – it is because what intrigues the novelist is not that which is lost but which‚ by dint of sheer will‚ could be returned to us‚ if only as a ghosting.
Shifting smoothly between past and present‚ RoseInnes’s novel works rather like the dead and absent father’s toolbox which‚ “when he tugged at the trays … magically concertinaed into cantilevered segments‚ like the mouthparts of a robotic insect”.
All of time‚ it seems‚ exists at a single moment so that‚ while we the reader have the sensation of moving forward‚ unriddling the grief at the novel’s core‚ it is‚ finally‚ that sense of all of time strangely trapped “like unexpected air pockets” in an eternal and remaindered present.
Rose-Innes gives us an archaeology of the present‚ a way in which to understand how we arrive at a given point of underst or its frustration. Rembrandt’s painting of St Jerome is one of many tropes through which we experience this thickly descriptive evocation.
It is the animal kingdom‚ in which humans play their minor role‚ which provides the novel with its shape.
The chapters have
titles such as “rooikat”‚ “dassie”‚ “mouse”‚ “parrot” and “snake”. These creatures are ciphers for a greater churning story which‚ after JM Coetzee‚ concerns the lives of animals – hunting; taxidermy; incarceration – and secreted in the deepest recesses‚ the dispossession of the majority of South Africans under colonialism and apartheid.
Saying this‚ I should emphatically state that while it ponders the fragility of white occupancy at the southernmost foot of Africa‚ and while it is acutely aware of states such as superannuation‚ Green Lion is not a predictably political novel. Rather‚ it is a novel acutely aware that all things become remaindered‚ all things pass. The phrase “Morituri te salutant!” recurs twice and means‚ “We who are about to die salute you!”
While morbid and wracked by grief‚ Green Lion is not‚ however‚ an exercise in miserabilism. Rather‚ it is the mortal coil that enfolds all of us which Rose-Innes conveys with breathtakingly incisive and evocative prose.
It is the strange mix of violence and tenderness which gives the novel its great power.
We are all the dead and the undead‚ for it is impossible to truly gauge the mystery of consciousness and the senses.
Green Lion is the author’s finest novel to date. It is a novel for those who cherish a tremulous rank stillness.
Amid the deluge of forgettable stories caught up in a history of trauma‚ crime‚ dystopia‚ revenge‚ liberation‚ gratuitous misery and facile levity‚ Green Lion stands as a solitary and shadowy work of genius. — Business Day