My Adventures in African Literature began in the south of the continent with a novel that offers a microcosm of a newly-independent nation struggling with injustice, racism and discord.
Johannesburg is set against the background of a momentous day in the history of South Africa, the death of its first independent President Nelson Mandela on 5 December 2013
For artist Gin (Virginia) Brandt, that day is significant for a very different reason — it’s her mother Neve’s 80th birthday and Gin has flown home from New York to organise a party. It has to be perfect in every detail because only then can she prove that she’s not the failure her mother always considered her to be. If the day goes exactly to plan, down to the smallest detail, then her mother will, she hopes, put aside her disappointment (and disapproval) that Gin is still single and childless.
So here she was, lining up vases, trying to correct a life’s worth of deficet with her mother, apologise for not being more fully a girl, and for leaving her mother to defend her choices on her behalf in her absence.
There is one big obstacle to this grand plan — Neve does not want a party. It’s such a terrible hassle and so inconvenient, she tells her daughter. She might not even show up.
Around this pair and their tense relationship, life and death go on in the city of Johannesburg.
Crowds of mourners gather outside the Mandela residence, encircled by police reinforcements and helicopters deployed to “keep the peace.” September, a homeless hunchback, stages a protest outside the headquarters of the mining company he holds responsible for injuries sustained during a pay dispute, Inside the glass-fronted building, the company’s lawyer struggles to keep control of his excitement at the prospect of meeting Gin once more. He’d been in love with her when they were teenagers but the relationship came to nothing — perhaps now he, he hopes, he will get a second chance.
Johannesburg shows a city of many perspectives. Its white residents barricade themselves into their homes behind high walls and security gates. They’re nervous whenever they venture outside their perimeters, using their cars as protection against beggars and hawkers.
Their servants long for a different kind of life — one where they are separated from their children, travelling hundreds of miles just to get work with leaving behind children who they seldom see. Mercy, housekeeper/cook to Neve, dreams of the day when she has a room or an apartment she can call her own for she has no privacy in Neve’s house.
It was not really her room. It was Mrs Brandt’s room … and if Mrs Brandt demanded to see what was in there or see how it was kept then what could Mercy do? …. Always she had thought, that if she could just have her own apartment or a room with a small kitchen and a chair outside under a big old tree … then she might feel different about living in the city. More whole perhaps and more true.
A room of her own. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? it’s just one of the connections to Virginia Woolf that Melrose weaves into her novel. Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own for example has echoes not only in Mercy’s dream but in Gin’s craving “A studio of her own … not a husband.”
Even stronger connections can be seen to Woolf’s pioneering novel Mrs Dalloway. it isn’t simply that both novels involve anxious preparations for a party or that the action takes place over a single day or that the narrative perspectives shift constantly. just like Mrs Dalloway, Johannesburg shows multiple interwoven lives and characters who are mirrors for each other — Clarissa and Gin are both white, middle class and privileged while September is physically damaged version of the traumatised Septimus Warren Smith.
Does it work? Johannesburg isn’t as groundbreaking as Mrs Dalloway and the stream of consciousness style isn’t as deftly handled. But Fiona Melrose does as fine a job as Woolf in showing the fragmentary nature of life in a city and the contrasting levels of justice experienced by its inhabitants. Those who zoom along its freeways cocooned in air conditioned cars, oblivious to the people living below on patches of wasteland.. Those who avoid parking fines by bribing the police and those who are gunned down when they try to secure better working conditions.
Well worth reading.