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Laurence Waters arrives at his rural hospital posting full of optimism. Frank, the disgruntled deputy, is forced to share his room with the new arrival but is determined to stay out of Laurence's ambitious schemes.
Damon Galgut's novel about post-Apartheid South Africa is compelling all the way through, but there is one relatively minor incident in the middle that gripped me immediately. The narrator, Frank Eloff, a doctor at a run-down hospital in the bush, goes for a brief visit to the city, where he stays with his father, a much more successful man. There is a vase of flowers on the mantel that is beginning to turn brown, and the father asks his fourth wife Valerie to have them removed; she says she's already told the maid. But when by evening the flowers have still not been taken away, Valerie speaks sideways to her while she is serving coffee:'Betty, the flowers... Don't you want to take them? They'd look so nice in your little room...'Then, as Betty carries the brown limp leaves from the mantelpiece to the door, Frank's father speaks: 'You're dropping petals, Betty. All over the place. Please, please...'. . . And the old lady in the nice blue uniform set the dying flowers down and got on to her knees. She started crawling across the floor, picking up bits of flowers as she went.======When I read this little episode, I thought it was a peripheral detail, to contrast Frank's Spartan world with that of the pampered bourgeoisie he has left behind. But I now see that its attitude of racial misunderstanding cloaked in a misplaced benevolence is reflected in just about every other aspect of this morally complex novel. Take the hospital, for instance. It is a run-down place with few facilities and almost no patients, built in one of the former Homelands, an area of impoverished land ceded by the white government for native self-determination. Now, with Apartheid past, all the buildings and institutions of the former capital have fallen into disuse. Frank, who has been there for some years, is one of two white doctors in the hospital. The other is a young do-gooder named Laurence Waters. He has deliberately sought out this remote area to do his required year of community service after graduation, and is full of plans for outreach activities such as clinics in surrounding villages. The older Frank, who has to share a room with Laurence, both likes and resents him, feeling his values challenged, but unable or unwilling to do much about them.Both doctors have black lovers. Laurence is quite open about his girlfriend, Zanele, an activist like him and an aid worker in nearby Lesotho. Frank drives out at night on the sly to visit the keeper of a souvenir shack in the surrounding area, an African woman whom he calls Maria. Both relationships ultimately fall into the chasm between vague benevolence and true empathy. Neither does the naive Laurence have much understanding of the political situation in this border territory, when a number of incidents draws a detachment of soldiers to area to strengthen security. Frank thinks he knows what is going on, but when the tensions explode into outright violence, it appears that he is as ignorant as his young colleague. [As is this reader, I am sorry to say; while Galgut builds the palpable atmosphere of danger simply beautifully, it is also difficult for a non-South African to grasp its exact nature.]The book jacket rightly compares Galgut to Graham Greene; the submerged political unrest is very much like the atmosphere of novels like THE COMEDIANS, and Frank himself might well be a cousin of the flawed protagonist of A BURNT-OUT CASE. Laurence, the well-meaning innocent, reminds me of the title character in THE LAMB by Greene's friend François Mauriac. But the author who most clearly hangs over this tale is the earlier J. M. Coetzee, whose DISGRACE shows a similar quest for moral clarity in an obscurely shifting racial world. Neither author suffers from this comparison.
