Love her or hate her

South African author Edyth Bulbring.

South African author Edyth Bulbring.

Published Jun 17, 2015

Share

In a genre made popular by such runaway successes as The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and Divergent, by Veronica Roth, which have both spawned film franchises, it is perhaps a difficult area to break into and put one’s own stamp on, but South African author Edyth Bulbring has done just that with her novel, The Mark.

This tells the story of a young woman, Juliet Seven – or Ettie, as she prefers to be known – who fights against a system that will see her serve her entire life as a drudge in service to the upper classes.

Though, as Bulbring says, there is a lot in The Mark that is similar to other examples of dystopian fiction, when she set out to write The Mark, she hadn’t read any in the genre.

“It was a completely new genre for me,” says Bulbring, “and I only started reading books like The Hunger Games and Divergent after I had written the first draft of The Mark.

“Looking back, I think there is one thing that sets The Mark apart from its fellows. This is that Juliet Seven, or Ettie, who has a prophecy about her saying that she will be the one to overturn the existing repressive system, does not know about the prophecy and she does not embrace popular rebellion.

“She is a loner, deeply suspicious of other people and she neither joins, nor identifies, with the movement in opposition to the existing order. But I think it reflects my belief that systems/ governments are pretty much all the same. They are all underpinned by ugly, greedy rich men with big guns.

“And, at the end of the day, behind the Mandelas and the Gandhis – the kinds of people whose heroic faces we so love to wear on our T-shirts and shout slogans about – the new systems that come about because of their sacrifices and the movements they inspire, simply turn out to be pretty much like the old ones – underpinned by ugly greedy rich men with big guns.

“Nothing ever changes. I think Ettie knows this, that one system is as rubbish as the next, which is why she chooses not to become the new poster girl for other people’s agendas.”

Ettie isn’t the special girl with all the special powers we’ve come to expect in Young Adult fiction. In fact, she isn’t even a very nice person, yet she does have some redeeming qualities. Why do we cheer for her despite her not-so-nice side?

Bulbring explains: “There are lots of not-so-nice things about Ettie. She is duplicitous, cunning and manipulative, a thief, a liar and she is driven by self-preservation. But there are two qualities that allow us to forgive her and root for her. The first is that when she loves, she loves hard and true. The second is that she is loyal to those she loves. I think we like the fact that she is discerning – she doesn’t care who likes her and likes few people in return.

“She is not into celebrity culture. She spends her love and loyalty frugally and doesn’t spread it around much but, when she does, she becomes incredibly vulnerable. Her love and loyalty make her behave contrary to her nature and have the power to break her. She knows this, and, despite it, she allows it to happen.”

The world Bulbring paints has little hope in it, and she shares that The Mark started off as a short story she wrote several years ago when her nine-year-old-son was tricked out of some money by a con artist while they were on holiday in Italy.

She says: “I wanted to explore the relationship between a hardened scammer and the boy who falls in love with her. The short story died, but I couldn’t forget the idea about the con artist and the boy, so I thought I would try and turn it into a book.

“When I thought about a setting, I realised that it would never work in South Africa, or even abroad. I had to set it in a place that didn’t exist. I needed to create a new place and a different time for them. So that’s what I did. I am also a keen recycler and gardener, and one of the things that drives me mental is the control that big corporations have over the environment and the production of food.

“I wanted to explore the consequences that the actions of a few greedy bastards would have on our future.”

There are few other survivors in this future, but hadedas are a remnant from the past and add a touch of magical realism to what might otherwise be straight SF.

Bulbring concludes: “The book is set some 250 years after a time when the world blew up and cut the face of the moon in half. Very little survived apart from fleas and rats and, of course, cockroaches. Except I love birds, especially hadedas, which are prehistoric looking, extremely deceptive in that they are ungainly and ugly, except up close they are quite extraordinarily beautiful.

“The sound they make (like strangled vuvuzelas) when they circle above my house and wake me every morning, makes me feel glad to be alive.

“In The Mark, the muti nags take the eyes out of the hadeda chicks so that they have a second sight.

“I chose them to be the blind tellers of the prophecy, because if there is one bird I imagined surviving a conflagration, it would be the hadeda. They look a billion years old and as if they are set to last another.”

Related Topics: