Review: Black Dog Summer

Published Oct 29, 2014

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by Miranda Sherry (Head Zeus/Jonathan Ball)

Something seems to have gone wrong with Sally’s dying. Three days after being killed in a farm attack, she is unable to let go. She is too invested in her young daughter, Gigi, who survived the attack but saw much of it.

Hovering disembodied above Johannesburg, Sally is overwhelmed by a terrible noise – whispering, humming, singing, screaming. Eventually she realises the sound comes from Africa’s stories being told, old and new.

After some time she is able to pick out story threads from within the wall of sound, threads that seem to be tethering her to Earth.

There’s the pulsing thread of her sister, Adele, her brother-in-law, Liam, of Gigi herself, tranquillised in hospital, and eventually of Bryony, her 11-year-old niece.

Sally’s death has jolted Adele and Liam – not only are they grieving and feeling guilty for reasons which become apparent, but there is Gigi to take care of, a teenager who has gone through unimaginable trauma and has washed up in their pleasant northern suburbs home.

The cousins barely know each other, thanks to a family fight years ago that saw Sally take herself and Gigi off to the farm. But now Bryony has to share her bedroom with this sullen stranger, and cope with the fallout her arrival has had on the family.

Lesedi, the sangoma who lives next door, sees Bryony drop a handful of white pebbles on the driveway and gazes down at them. “Interesting,” says Lesedi, “the way the stones fell.” And then she adds: “You must be careful. Be careful.”

And so the family circles and dips around Gigi and her pain, with Bryony and her brother unable to understand the tension the teenager has brought with her, and quite unaware of the secrets Gigi’s arrival has stirred up.

Black Dog Summer is Miranda Sherry’s fourth novel, but the first to be published. The others represent her apprenticeship, she tells me during an interview over tea at the Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town.

Sherry is a slight figure, fair and pretty. She always wanted to write, to give expression to her creativity.

“I did kids’ TV, puppeteering, voice work and acting, but the problem with being in plays was that I was giving voice to someone else’s words.”

She sang in a band, wrote songs, went to London where she worked in bars and restaurants, and none of this was what she wanted.

“The going nowhereness of this life pushed me.” So she came home, wrote her first novel, and read and read, a lot of it about writing.

“That was the greatest teaching aid. Stephen King’s On Writing was seminal, really brilliant.”

Eventually she wrote Black Dog Summer, but she still battled to raise any interest in the manuscript.

“Fiction is such a small market in South Africa. I really despaired – my novel existed only on my laptop. I submitted it endlessly. I became very demoralised, felt I was going to stop exposing myself to all this rejection.

“A friend suggested I contact an agent in London, and he loved it. Last September he phoned to say he had a publisher, and then after 10 years of beating on doors there was a small bidding war.

“I had been so passionate about wanting it, and here was a publisher giving me a publication date – it was life-changing.”

The book doesn’t focus on the farm killings; Sherry says she could have chosen any violent, abhorrent event. It’s not about the murders but the consequences.

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