An unnatural history
employees gets too close to the animals and is badly mauled.
For most of the novel Mark lies in hospital, suspended Lazaruslike in bandages, while old friend Constantine (Con) takes his place as a volunteer, comforts his elderly mother, figures out his life. And so the novel engages that fertile but often ignored literary subject — a difficult friendship — and the way in which the fierce intimacies of youth dwindle to mere adult acquaintance.
We gradually learn of Con and Mark’s childhood together and the tragedy that haunts it, but there is little by way of plot to intrude on the novel’s main achievement: the evocation of a world in which most wild animals have disappeared — and what the psychic consequences of this might be. In this future that may well be the present, Table Mountain has become a fenced preserve for the few species that remain: a 21st-century Ark that is guarded and (in theory) only accessible through expensive guided tours.
I am hardly an “animal per- son” — certainly not the kind of animal person who populates one wry scene in the novel where a cultish group gathers to watch nature documentaries and fondle pythons with quasi-religious intensity. But the power of Green Lion is to remind us that we are all, in fact, animal people. That the physical and psychological residue of the creatures we evolved with and from is still within us: in our figures of speech, on our currency, in our dreams, in our breathing.
Rose-Innes’s prose is minutely alert to what George Steiner called the “teeming strangeness and menace” of the organic presence all around us, and the pressure that it exerts at the borders of our understanding.
Pulsing behind it all is something deeply sorrowful: a work of mourning for both the human losses within the book but also the life forms that are vanishing from the earth beyond.
Green Lion reads as a local requiem for this global story: for the vast planetary die-off that is mostly happening outside language, that is both immeasurably sad and inescapably “natural”. Rose-Innes’s work seeks out ways of honouring our animal ghosts and keeping them, in some small and symbolic measure, alive. — Hedley Twidle
• Rose-Innes will be at the Franschhoek Literary Festival