Alexander Fuller: Scribbling the Cat

Reviewed by SIOBHAN HARVEY

The only obscure thing about Alexander Fuller's second memoir is its title — an allusion to the transcription of a detour through Africa and, in military parlance, to death. Aside from this, it's a mesmerising, gritty account of the author's involvement with a group of rough-edged mercenaries, one that sharply analyses the nature of exile, and how people treat war as an addictive occupation.

It centres upon former Rhodesian Army adjunct K, whom Fuller falls in with when she returns to her family's retreat in the Sole Valley, Zambia, a place of "generous people, made brittle with heat and disease".

K's story alone deserves a biography. An African public schoolboy turned sour by rape and bullying, he survived by being brutal, training that inevitably prepared him for his service in the white armies fighting in Africa in the '70s. Even when he turned his back on such ruthless regimentation, the normality of home, wife and child also quickly went wrong, his subsequent divorce and son's death pushing K to become a fervent born-again Christian.

All of this is exposed when Fuller joins K on a trip to Mozambique, retracing the march of his forces during Rhodesia's war of independence. Along the way, K confesses to the horrors he was complicit in, and joins up with an absorbing and dysfunctional set of friends, such as the Rileys, former mercenaries turned sweethearts; and St Memba, an old combatant now tormented by metal legs and nightmares.

What's most compelling about this book, though, is its wonderful writing about landscape, which comes to the fore most prominently when the pair — Zimbabwean exiles both — journey through their former homeland. Here, as a counterpoint to the author's idyllic memories of youth, Fuller writes of the realities of life under Robert Mugabe, whose rule of incipient bribery, crime and shortages so redolently reminds us of the worst of Africa's past tyrannies. In this, ultimately, we witness how, like K, the author remains locked into her own search for belonging.

Given the recent acres of newsprint devoted to Mark Thatcher's involvement in the mustering of African rebel troops, Scribbling the Cat is a timely expose of the complex and sordid nature of mercenary life. It's also an enthralling and necessary reminder of the current ruin Zimbabwe endures while the world turns its attention elsewhere.

* Picador, $34.95

* Siobhan Harvey is an Auckland writer and tutor