Etienne van Heerden: The Long Silence Of Mario Salviati

Reviewed by MICHAEL LARSEN

This sinewy novel ambitiously covers a great swathe of history - the Boer War up until the election of the first post-apartheid government in South Africa and everything in between - and it sets out, too, to map the human heart. Van Heerden succeeds by presenting a glittering array of characters with often symbolic names whose pasts and presents intertwine, often with disturbing results.

Ingi Friedlander is the catalyst, the wide-eyed museum curator who enters the quiet village of Yearsonend near the dusty plains of Great Karoo, north east of Cape Town. Ostensibly she is in search of the Staggering Merman, a sculpture that has gained a reputation of mythical proportions, much like the red-bearded, marijuana-hazed Jonty Jack, the sculpture's supposed creator. Supposed, because Jonty Jack insists that the sculpture appeared out of the earth, out of nowhere. Ingi's relationship with Jonty unleashes a cavalcade of secrets and histories, like the stones that cover the secrets in the cave on Mount Improbable, secrets revealed near the end of the book.

In this town that seems a little too neatly a microcosm of South Africa, Ingi learns that somehow everyone is related, and that blood - coloured and white, Italian and Afrikaans - criss-crosses through the veins of these people like the great water project started by Jonty Jack's father Big Karel and the dumb "eyetie", Mario Salviati.

Mario lives in the Drostdy, a beautiful old government building where Ingi ends up staying, and despite his muteness, dumbness and eventual blindness, his knowledge of what may lie in the cave is the key to the meanderings of the book.

What lifts this from the farcical is the surreal, almost fantastical nature of the tale, and the way it is structured. Thankfully, Van Heerden supplies a Yearsonend family tree, for not only do bloodlines mix and mingle, the past blends so seamlessly with the present that figures long-dead grace the pages as if they were living. People like the mad general should, by any normal calculations, be dead, despite van Heerden's placing them in the present.

While the bare bones of the plot may be a bloodthirsty search for the gold in the cave, it's really a nation searching to define itself, where the liberating black contingent seems as corrupt as the repressing whites. It is also a search through art, via Ingi, of our own soul, of what drives us, and of what we live for. These themes are picked up and also translated into some of the other characters.

The book intrigues, and holds you as it deals rather liberally with time and place. And it's not the first novel to deal with farmers, angels and furtive histories. Yes, indeed, The Vintner's Luck comes to mind more than once. And that's a positive comparison. Especially if you like symbolism in your literature.

* Michael Larsen is an Auckland freelance writer.