The Safest Place You Know
Mark Winkler
Loot.co.za (R189)
Umuzi
Reviewer: Jennifer Crocker
Hennie Durandt lives in the Free State during the 1980s. Apartheid is a real thing and so is the letter he receives on a baking hot day from his sister Rose, who he has not seen for years.
The letter contains information about his layabout drunk father. It also contains a postal order for a lot of money.
Young Hennie, who is just 17, returns to the hard-scrabble farm where the drought has taken its toll. The livestock is gone and his father is drinking himself to death.
From the first chapter of this book there is a wonderful evocation of time and place. A place framed by postal orders and dust. He cashes the postal order at the post office and returns to the farm. On his way he buys a bottle of brandy and 24 cans of beer. Then he makes his way out of the dorp and leaves it: “Hennie swung the bakkie across the dusty tar of Main Street and when he saw Saiman father and son watching slack-jawed as they stood amid the racks of vegetables and cereal boxes and cans of beans, he knew he would never see them again.”
On his return to the farm he commences feeding his father brandy sitting outside on the stoep of the house.
And then Hennie leaves the farm, his father dead and with no clear idea of where he should be headed except that he has to get away and that the general direction of home should be Rose in Cape Town.
Mark Winkler keeps the narrative tension of this novel tight; balancing two different realities against each other.
In Paarl in very different circumstances on a Paarl wine estate that is flourishing under the malign hand of its owner, Oliver Maidenstone Basset returns home and dies at his desk. He is found by the domestic worker, Johanna. She calls his daughter, Antoinette, who has no love or regard for her father and the main protagonists of the story are introduced to the readers.
Hennie begins his trip to Cape Town in the old farm bakkie which soon blows up and he finds himself with a chatty and kind truck driver who offers him a lift to Worcester. At this stage Hennie has begun to spin a new narrative of where he comes from and what his name is.
There is an element of the road trip story in this novel, but skilfully in as much as it moves the plot. Hennie will not catch a train to Cape Town, because of something that Rose has put in her letter. Instead he walks through the mountains back to Rawsonville, and is taken aback when he meets a couple at a run-down bed and breakfast who take him in for the night.
He tells them, probably dissembling, that he is on his way to Worcester to catch a train to Cape Town and unexpectedly the man who owns the bed and breakfast offers to take him to Du Toit’s Kloof Pass. And so Hennie begins the journey that will ignite an already flawless story.
On the way he comes across a seemingly mute girl who doggedly follows him, until they reach Paarl and two tragedies in the form of Hennie and angry and bitter Antoinette collide. Oliver has left a will that rules from the grave. The farm is Antoinette’s unless she moves from it or stops farming it.
The twists and turns in the novel are fairly simple in some ways and utterly unexpected in others. What Winkler has achieved is to write a story about damaged people who seem to carry their dead with them. In one sense it is tempting to ascribe this to new research that shows that generational suffering and sin are visited on many generations.
In another sense the book, through the story of Johanna and the bizarre tragedy that has brought her to Paarl after she and her late husband have been thrown off their farms due to apartheid’s absurd rules, tells the story of the bitter pain of the years that apartheid was both killing those under its thrall and eating itself alive like a serpent beginning at its tail.
There is great tragedy in this book, played out in small episodes. The text is near pitch perfect and there is much that is hard and bitter in the book. But, and this is important, it is redeemed through a balancing act of fiction writing that at times takes the reader into the realm of magical realism. And it is a subtle form of the style which allows the reader to take leaps of faith and belief in the text.
It allows for resolutions and conflicts to be managed and narrated. It’s not a cheerful book, but at times it is funny. It’s filled with bitter and horrific history, but there is redemption in the form of the little girl. It is not JM Coetzee’s Disgrace; it is a far better book than that.
Winkler has, in this novel, taken his position as an extremely important writer, both in terms of South African literature and, I would wager, on the world stage.