This reader impression was written and sent to LitNet on the writer's own initiative.
Reading Dan Wylie’s futuristic novella, The flight of the bat, in a time when our newsfeeds are dominated by reports of the effects of an ongoing global pandemic, widespread political instability and looming environmental disaster, is at times a deeply unsettling experience.
Not to say that Wylie’s writing is bleak. In fact, it is infused with a delightful dry wit and playfulness, supported by vibrant descriptions of the Eastern Cape’s natural landscape that speak of an intimate knowledge of and respect for the area.
However, one cannot help but be plagued by the uncomfortable sense that we, as a species, have been plodding along a trajectory that will inevitably lead us to a future not too indistinguishable from the novella’s dystopian world.
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However, one cannot help but be plagued by the uncomfortable sense that we, as a species, have been plodding along a trajectory that will inevitably lead us to a future not too indistinguishable from the novella’s dystopian world.
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Wylie himself has stated that his futuristic fiction is not science fiction, but rather “realist speculative fiction” – a simple extrapolation of events already set in motion by the human race’s near-dogged determination to destroy ourselves and our environment.
Set in the year 2170, in what is left of the Eastern Cape after a century-long Slow Apocalypse, The flight of the bat explores themes of environmental cataclysm, the nature of belonging, self-discovery and redemption.
When “bookish but ungovernable” Kato Marnus is exiled from the relative safety of the settlement of Rhini (a post-apocalyptic Grahamstown), he is forced to traverse an inhospitable landscape in search of a new home.
Armed with only some basic supplies and a battered copy of Patrick White’s Voss, Marnus is in deep, deep trouble. For not very much remains to be salvaged in Wylie’s vision of 22nd century South Africa. The settlements around Rhini have long been reduced to mere way stations for scattered survivors, dilapidated and vulnerable to attacks by roving bands of marauders known as Shabs. The high-tech enclave of Buffalo has been walled off to “diseased barbarians” from the outside, and nobody really knows what lies beyond Kings on the Entu (N2).
Just as it seems that there is no new home for Marnus to turn to, he quite literally falls in with the Mud People, a group of indigenous people “so isolated from the rest of the world that it has forfeited the very vocabulary of comprehension, of belonging within its greater history” (75).
Like Margaret Atwood’s Children of Crake, Wylie’s Mud People are born into this Brave New World and exist outside of any pre-apocalyptic metanarratives and societal structures.
Marnus’s reading of Patrick White’s Voss throughout his journey colours his image of himself as intrepid explorer and teacher to the Mud People: “He is, he thinks, Evans-Pritchard among the Nuer, Descola among the Amazonians, Voss among the blackfellas, only even more precarious and unhomed” (75).
However, the Mud People undermine this notion through their persistent evasion of neat First Nation myths.
They do not engage in musicality and ritual dance as Marnus expects of first societies, and there are no “stereotypical round-the-hearth story-telling sessions” among this group.
What rituals they do perform are so finely nuanced that it is impossible to divine their meaning. Even the very concept of ownership has been lost to the Mud People.
The group seems indulgent of Kato’s daily rambling political and historical seminars, but they remain altogether uncomprehending and unmoved by his teachings.
Faced with an existence devoid of any purpose, Marnus is forced to re-examine his own notions of what constitutes a meaningful life. He begins to question the concepts of maintenance, progress and growth espoused in Rhini. He ponders the futility of upholding a long-collapsed way of life he himself has only glimpsed fragments of through old books and the teachings of his Varsity mentor, The Don (a tribute to Wylie’s friend, the late poet Don Maclennan).
To say much more would be spoiling the reason for Marnus’s exile and the culmination of his journey of self-discovery. So, I will conclude by saying that The flight of the bat is an engaging, thought-provoking novella and a valuable addition to the growing genre of South African speculative fiction.
Readers interested in further exploring this world can also grab a copy of Wylie’s The wisdom of adders, a novella running in parallel with The flight of the bat.
- The flight of the bat can be bought by contacting the author at d.wylie@ru.ac.za.
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