The wisdom of adders
Dan Wylie
Publisher: Dan Wylie
ISBN: 9780620702775
This is the story of a journey through a type of dystopia. The setting is the Eastern Cape in South Africa in the year 2170.
To read is also a journey. I felt fraught in the first stages of the journey, but let me first mention what does work in this book.
The diction is good. It is a strange mixture of quaint, jaunty (a quaint word itself) and edgy. But, generally, the author’s voice is highly accessible and young at heart.
We expect our protagonist to change somehow during the course of the story. When this happens towards the end of the book on pages 120 and 121, it is neatly done and convincing.
The sense of humour is innocent and fun, and has a hint of provocation. Take the “dialogue” with a puff adder on page 13. The author had a lot of fun inventing place names which allude to actual towns. The play on geographical place names will be a lot of fun for those who know South Africa; and perhaps the downright common South African terms like dop (an Afrikaans word for an alcoholic drink, widely used in our country) or expressions like deep kak will also be appreciated – it is one way to appeal to Everyman, although I find this use of diction too jaunty. The invention of race categories is amusing and inventive – although any attempt at creating race, even its reinvention, remains superficial. The geographical inventions have more mellow depth. Only one place retains its actual name. Read the book to discover it.
Wylie’s knowledge of flora is remarkable. His descriptions of flora are memorable and fresh, for example: “And this kind of aloe, squeeze the juice onto any wound, it disinfects, remember the russet mottle under the leaf, this backward curve of the teeth; other varieties might kill you instead” (page 20).
The artwork on the cover is a display of pattern and colour that you don’t mind having on your bedside table even after you have finished reading. It’s a painting of a puff adder by the author himself. In any written word, a snake can’t avoid being a symbol … but, of what? Danger is obvious. But, what else? Whereas other authors weave their symbolism distinctly and pervasively by peppering it throughout the text, Wylie left me pondering. Does the snake stand for patience? Or survival? Beauty? Mystery? Surely we aren’t meant to take the quote from Matthew 10:16, Wylie’s only foreword, at face value? This lingering question about the snake is part of the appeal of the book. Only much later did I think that the title could be a type of foreshadowing, for, like the snake itself, the title is forked. Its ambiguity comes as an irony … Is it the wisdom of an adder? Or what humans know of adders? Explaining more here would be a spoiler.
The author finds a clever way to weave poetry into the book. I did catch myself thinking that it’s a too convenient way for a writer to publish poetry. Not all the poems were good. They were descriptive in the mode of the epic poem, with a sense of grand appeal suited to heroic struggles, but they did not move me on the level of the basic human condition. What I mean is that they did not wrench some new emotion out of my tired and frayed soul. The poem on page 105 is good, though – it amalgamates imagery in a fantastic way to prod successfully at emotion. However, the poems (even though they describe various ages in human “progress”) do lend a timeless appeal to the book. The better “poetry” in the book is the recurrence of natural themes, like the jackal.
The story as a whole is set so far in the future, yet is so grounded in our connection to the primitive and natural world, that it conveys the same type of timeless appeal as Game of Thrones (although the latter’s genre is fantasy). For this reason, we can forgive the sometimes hackneyed feeling of the poems.
The wisdom of adders is speculative fiction. Wylie himself calls it futuristic. In Wylie’s book, there is no optimistic speculation on technological advances. What Wylie offers is the more sobering view of “progress”.
I asked Dan Wylie what research he had done into the genre. Herewith his response: “I have taught some futuristic and sci-fi work, especially Ursula le Guin, and supervised a thesis on SA speculative fiction (including Coetzee’s Life & times of Michael K and Jane Rosenthal’s Souvenir). But, mostly, I have just in the course of things read a lot of climate-change scientific literature, laying out what might happen if current trends continue (James Hansen, Tim Flannery, George Monbiot and others). And local works by Patrick Bond (Unsustainable South Africa) and Jackie Cock (The war against ourselves) in particular.”
Wylie elaborated on his idea: “When I say this is a ‘futuristic’ work, many people respond, ‘Oh, I don’t like science-fiction.’ Margaret Atwood defined ‘sci-fi’ as involving such improbabilities as interplanetary travel, time travel, alien invasions and a high interest in technology for its own sake; and ‘speculative fiction’ as real-world extrapolations of visible, credible current trends, obviously including technology, into a plausible future scenario. Adders is very much the latter. In this vision of the future, there has been a kind of slow apocalypse, a global collapse of technology and communications on numerous fronts, and a radical reduction in human populations, which now exist in more isolated pockets, some still highly technologised, others more ‘medieval’ in their modes of subsistence. The Rhini (Grahamstown) of 2170 is such a villagey pocket in a partly blighted, partly recovering landscape. So, it’s neither utopian nor dystopian, and mostly it’s just a story about a young woman trying to reconnect with her father. The human core. As far as I know, it’s the first such speculative fiction set in this particular area.”
Wylie says that he did want to incorporate some thinking about our possible future, and he therefore tried to build in a little bit of “future-history” – speculation about what might happen to us and the countryside over the next century and a half. He wanted to create an awareness not only of how humans might be living, but also around what happens to vegetation, animal populations, air quality, temperatures, water availability – all those things we will inevitably continue to depend on. So, for example, he envisages a blowout of the nuclear plant that authorities are threatening to build on the Eastern Cape coast (in the same way as Chernobyl or Fukushima), and a disastrous outcome of fracking in the Karoo (outcomes which have already happened elsewhere). Wylie comments on the latter: “There is nothing fictional about this – or about anything else I have included; it’s all stuff that’s already going on. If we don’t envisage the possible outcomes of such present day trends, how can we possibly address the issues?”
In this attempt at extrapolation, the book succeeds.
I did get a sense, however, that Wylie’s knowledge of fauna and flora, of science and technology and eco issues is more distinct than his observations of humans. There are a few delightful descriptions of human cognition, as in this stanza:
She could not have said when she became aware of another presence, as one cannot tell precisely when a thought begins. Something that was scarcely a sound, yet not quite soundless, as quiet as the flow of blood beneath the skin, and as tangible.
But, there is not much of this in the book. Compare Wylie’s book with a book like Horrelpoort by Eben Venter, and you will find in Venter’s character Marlow a much more complex and interesting soul. However, Venter’s truths are closer to the present, and so, perhaps, his characters also more rounded and real. Wylie’s characters are familiar but predictable, instead of individualised, and fresh insights into human psychology are sparse.
What bothered me in Wylie’s book is his description of his main character. It’s always interesting to study characterisation of a female character done by a male author.
His main character, Shawn (the name itself alerts us to potential masculine attributes and an action-orientated journey), works as a carpenter and does maintenance at the local church – it’s just a job, not a labour of love. Why she has to work at a church could allude to themes of innocence and knowledge in the book, although it did make me wonder whether the author has an inkling of the missionary in him.
Shawn is a woman who goes against the grain (no carpentry wood-sanding pun intended). So what about women who are not stereotypical? Most men would like to say something complimentary about them, without sounding patronising. Wylie does try. However, it is somewhat unfortunate that the character can only be rugged enough for a trying adventure because the author finds familiar ways to make her stereotypical manliness or androgyny known: she’s a woman of few words, has a flat chest, has a name sounding like a boy’s, and sometimes copulates just to grant an old flame a mercy fuck. On top of that, she has to deal with the stereotypical insults flung her way, which she does with a steely composure. Quite predictably, her character development is centred around the question: But can she love? And the themes in the book play into a rites-of-passage type of innocence-to-experience quest usually bestowed on male characterisation.
The net effect of the author’s attempts? I did not have much sympathy for Shawn. That is a pity. After all, the ingredients are there for sympathy. She has lost contact with her father – a form of rejection – and her mother could be one of a group of people. (Read the book for this interesting mothers-daughter relationship. Yes … mothers – plural.)
Wylie does not quite pull through on the feminist attempt. I found myself turning to other attempts. Often, art forms other than literature offer a better modelling of a heroine. Take what Alison Moyet has to say about Alison Goldfrapp: “I have always loved a hard-faced girl. I get that Alison Goldfrapp isn’t easy, and I like her belligerence. She’s deeply sexy and controlled, like a Strict Machine, and it seems to wind the b’jesus out of the women I know. On the outside, I watch and smile and will her on like a twisted, silent maiden aunt in the dark corner.”
For a sense of what Alison Moyet means, just go to YouTube and listen to Anymore by Goldfrapp, or watch Ride a white horse. These are clips with aspects of dystopia, too.
I am not an expert on female characterisation in speculative fiction, but one day I’ll make time to read the work by Iain M Banks. He is a Scottish writer, and I have heard that he creates remarkably honest female characters. I will start with his book The wasp factory. It is commendable, however, that Dan Wylie tries to celebrate female strength via his main character. There are other women in the book, but they are either motherly, or rooted and earthy but happily docile (like the allomothers); otherwise, they are whimsical and scattered, like the character Angela, who has a sleepwalker, Lady Macbeth aspect, and is surrounded by men using Eurocentric diction. Perhaps, if Wylie had used another strong and feisty woman character to describe the main character, he would have convinced us more authentically. I was, however, really happy with the male characterisation of Mali. And the imagery in the book seems to come alive in his presence: “Next to Mali’s pack lay a long tubular shape – the map, rolled back into its housing like a renewable promise.”
It must also be said that Wylie’s use of vocabulary and idiomatic English is great. Take a sentence like this: “When it had passed and the dust settled, a weird mystic light suffused her little valley, buttery and reddened, until the sun finally dropped and a colder grey crept in.” … I had to look up the word “suffused”. What a lovely word.
Overall, a good and quick read. I’d say 8 out of 10. I definitely think this could be a movie. The director might have to compromise in order to choose a target audience, though. The book has the specialist facts on fauna, flora and local geography to satisfy an older generation. The action, characters and plot would appeal to a younger generation. If I were directing this, I’d aim for the youth. They are, after all, our future.
More works by Dan Wylie:
Myth of iron: Shaka in history
Dead leaves: two years in the Rhodesian war
Elephant and Crocodile in the Reaktion Books Animals Series
and seven volumes of poetry.
He blogs at Dan Wylie critical diaries.
- Dan Wylie is professor in English at Rhodes University in Grahamstown.
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