The Fetch
Finuala Dowling
Kwela, Cape Town
ISBN: 9780795707179
“Transformation” is a word that at present is being tossed about in the political and social air, kept afloat by accusations and defensive appeals, among other pronouncements. Novels like The Fetch suggest a way of opening up the word to apply it – along with its meanings of change and progress – to literature. This entails going back to 1984, to a keynote address by Njabulo Ndebele.
Ndebele, a writer who is also one of our most perceptive and prescient cultural critics, titled this address “The Rediscovery of the Ordinary”. It has since been published in a collection of essays (1991). In this collection, referring predominantly to black protest writers, Ndebele says that in South Africa literature had “located itself in the field of politics” and that “it has done so without discovering and defining the basis of its integrity as an art form” (1991:85). One of the results of this failure was, he says, its reliance on a “highly dramatic, highly demonstrative form of literary representation”, devoted to “the highly organized spectacle of the political wrestling match of the South African social formation” (1991:31).
Even today, more than 20 years after the abolition of formal apartheid, biographies and other non-fictional forms that often recall the violence of the apartheid period remain popular in our country. But what is happening in the field of fiction? Fortunately for the development of the art form we have writers like Dowling and novels like The Fetch, for in The Fetch Dowling asserts precisely the central value of “the ordinary”, doing so through plot, character and style.
Her style is plain – neither “highly dramatic”, nor “highly demonstrative”. It does not draw attention to itself:
A couple sat at a window table, eating, but otherwise the restaurant side of things was empty. Sharon was at work in the shop section. She directed Nina outside. On the deck, her husband Neville was moving three tables together in preparation for the meeting. (15)
There is no exhibition of cleverness, though the tale is peppered with Dowling’s characteristically subtle (and clever), sly wit and humour. Worms in a worm farm are described as leaving “no apricot stone unturned” (14). There is also no strenuously figurative or descriptive language, though there are controlling motifs, such as the “fetch” of the title which attracts metaphorical meaning. As defined in the front of the book, it may mean “the distance that a wave travels without impediment before reaching the nearest coast”, but for some in this coastal community it is a reminder of the stretch of time that encompasses a life or a period in a life. Chas dies prematurely, of Aids. For Nina and William, after years of emotional toing and froing, the “coast” they fetch up on is each other.
Dowling’s metaphors do not merely adorn, they earn their keep, as in “transforming her mousy words into dapper footmen in shiny livery”, where the imagery is part of a sustained, but not insistent, critique of Nina’s approach to her emotional and sexual life – one of naive idealisation fed by fairy tales and popular romance.
A particular source of pleasure in this novel is the finely observed, exact descriptions of place. Place is the small settlement of Slangkop, near the lighthouse close to Kommetjie, and the ridges behind Slangkop. Such exactness signals not merely the importance of place to author and character, but also, as the plot reveals, that one is more likely to achieve happiness if one sees as clearly as possible, if one engages with experience to the full extent of the senses, with attention, clarity of mind:
Although the Slangkop sign was clear – bold black writing on a white background – there was no immediate evidence of human settlement. You had to look closely to see where the untarred access road began its plunge through the reeds and milkwoods to the sea.
…
To allow [the van] to pass they had to step backward into the fynbos. Their action disturbed a sunbird in a sugarbush: he ceased his tseep-tseep and flew away. The women stood for a moment among the sea roses and fragrant buchu, watching the bakery van making its perilous way down to the plateau. (3)
We’re on the first page and, located in Nina’s consciousness, we are invited to note her imaginative sympathy with those who built the road – they were probably convicts – as she “touches the stone of the cutting”; meanwhile her other senses – visual, aural, and nasal – are all responding to her surroundings, making the reader’s experience felt, immersive. Dowling’s style bears the influence of values central to the narrative, such as attempting to perceive and care for / take care of what and who are materially real and close by, rather than what one may desire and so fantasise about. This is the lesson Nina learns as she transfers her affection from Chas to William.
The tale, then, follows a conventional trajectory: girl meets boy, but he, though glamorous, wealthy, a Prince Charming, is the wrong boy; as she shucks off the blindness of enchantment, the girl grows to appreciate the qualities of the more homely boy (who has always wanted her) and they marry, tidy up his messy house, and she falls pregnant. So far, so conventional. It is the South Africanness of this version, even its Western Capeness (the fynbos, for instance), as well as its mood – gently wry, humorous, stingingly satirical at times, but also with a tragic element that lends depth – that gives The Fetch freshness, originality and particularity.
Dowling – who began her writing career as a poet, for which she has won the Ingrid Jonker Prize, the Sanlam Prize for Poetry, and the Olive Schreiner Prize – won the 2012 M-Net Literary Award for her first novel. The Fetch is her fourth. In The Fetch, a group of neighbours interact with one another in a small community over a period of years, as the novel’s sections move elliptically through time: the “politics” is that of the “ordinary”, of the necessity for kindness, taking care of one another, especially in times of need, individually and collectively. Through the hedonistic Chas Fawkes and his patrician mother, Dowling suggests the alienness and decline of ways of life reaching back to Britain as “home’. The name of the Fawkes’s house, The Midden, is ironic.
Chas’s is not the only death. Four among the small group of characters die, only one of them, Chas’s mother, having lived to what could be called a ripe old age. It is the death of Emmanuel, servant to Chas and his mother, that deepens the element of tragedy in the novel and makes it more than a comedy of manners. Emmanuel, when free to sit in his room, which is outside Chas’s large house, endeavours to extend his constricted world through knowledge. Nina, who is a librarian, brings him books and a radio on which he can listen to the BBC. Of his language proficiency, Nina thinks that it marks a heroic struggle to survive:
Emmanuel’s language was not really broken Afrikaans or broken anything. It was an idiolect made up of words garnered from his travels across southern Africa, all held together with mime. And something else: sheer will, Emmanuel’s determination that his interlocutor would understand him. (81)
When Chas, to whose service he has been devoted, says he suspects him of stealing, William is devastated by the realisation that he has failed to be understood by the most significant person in his life, and the old man’s will to live collapses. Chas, in effect, kills him. And Dowling captures in this sad tragedy, of an ordinary, ageing servant and his pampered, thoughtless master, a glimpse of the callous brutality that inhered in the apartheid system, and that endures. Though the period is not specified (the narrative covers a stretch of eight years), the sanctioned intermingling of “black” and “white” in domestic and public spaces indicates the post-apartheid period.
William, by contrast with Chas (who is a lifelong friend), instead of throwing alcohol-fuelled parties, is attuned to nature, is loyal and tender towards his friends. No elegant prince, he is instead an eccentric, almost clown-like, suitor, badly dressed and capable only of very clumsy addresses to Nina. He frequently bores his companions with too much information about flora and fauna; his home has a random collection of creatures and is stuffed with a chaotic mix of bits and pieces that may come in handy. But we are meant to see that this kind man, like the proverbial “boer”, does frequently have a plan. As a result, he often comes to the rescue, even taking in an abandoned baby, and he does, with the help of Nina once she moves in, impose order in his home.
The most authoritative character in The Fetch is Fundiswa. She lives in the same block of flats as Nina. A nurse, she has been educated and once (as she constantly reminds her neighbours) worked for the WHO. Independent, she owns a flat and is having an enjoyable affair with a bishop. She is the source of wise advice (often ignored) about how the much younger Nina should conduct her emotional life.
There is much to charm and delight — not least some very funny dialogue — in this story about a motley ("mixed") group of South Africans living their "ordinary" lives and learning to express love for each other in practical ways.
Here it was, then, [Nina] thought, a marriage proposal. She wished William would stop swivelling in Chas’s chair and look a bit more capable of love. Not that she needed proof of that: it still shamed her to think how much the better friend he had been to Chas through his illness and death. The whole of Slangkop had relied on William during that time. And it didn’t end there. She depended on him … He would make a good husband, she knew: faithful, compassionate, practical. (306)
I suggest that Ndebele would approve of the aesthetic and community values promoted by this novel, and that such values are compatible with the change and progress required of transformation.
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