Andre Brink: Praying mantis

Show me a good magic realist novel and I'll show you five bad ones.

Magic realism — think of it as the bastard child of conventional realist fiction and myth — is the easiest of literary forms to write badly, for much the same reason that dream sequences in film or TV usually fall flat. It offers more freedom than most writers know what to do with. If a story is set in a world where anything at all can happen at any moment, purely on the basis on authorial whim, it's surprisingly hard to care about it.

So I sighed heavily when it became apparent that Andre Brink's novel about the Black South African folk hero Cupido Cockroach was going to throw everyday narrative logic out the window.

I sighed even more heavily when it turned out that Brink was going to build his "who needs rationality anyway?" approach to storytelling into the rhythms of his language. If this book were a car ride, the driver would be stepping hard on the brakes whenever he saw a red car coming the other way, accelerating madly at every 15th lamp post, and swerving back and forth any time he thought you might be getting overly relaxed.

Curious, then, that I ended up reading it so avidly. The language is most definitely an acquired taste, but it has an exhilarating fizz to it once you get over the initial shock.

The storytelling works wonderfully, and the reason is that Cupido Cockroach, or Kupido Kakkerlak, in Dutch, really existed. He was born around the year 1760, made a name for himself as one of the Cape of Good Hope's greatest drinkers, fighters, and womanisers, converted to Christianity and became one of the first native African missionaries, and in the end lost his congregation and his family after getting caught up in the power struggles between the missionaries and the Dutch settlers.

So the extreme liberties Brink allows himself in telling his story can never become a wholesale slide into narrative anarchy, because the hard bones of a real life always lie just under the surface. Cupido meets gods, plucks stars from the sky, and makes love with mermaids — as well as dogs, goats, holes in the ground, and half the women he meets.

But his story never feels whimsical or, oddly, implausible. It has its own inner logic. The effect is to draw us fully inside the mind of a man living lives half in the dreamtime of his people, and half in the equally strange hellfire and brimstone world of the preachers who convert him.

This is a powerful and startling book, written with a great deal more skill than is initially obvious. Brink convincingly demonstrates the truth of a claim he makes in his afterword: "The enigma of another's life can only be grasped through the imagination."

* David Larsen is an Auckland reviewer.
* Secker & Warburg, $26.95