by Michiel Heyns (Jonathan Ball Publishers)
A Sportful Malice is a delicious, wicked novel and has enough malice to add an edge to the hilarious passages and robust characters.
But then I was always going to fall for a sly parody on the famous “love affair with Tuscany”, which, though my favourite destination, admittedly sags with “under the Tuscan sun” myths, of lonely-hearts yearning for an Italian romance and pretentious people yapping about High Art.
Tuscany is ravishing, but with a dark side, observes tall, quietly spoken author Michiel Heyns, as we sit under an oak tree in Somerset West, where he lives. An award-winning author and translator, former professor of English at Stellenbosch, Heyns has now turned his considerable talents to producing a regular slew of diversely thoughtful and entertaining books.
Though not autobiographical, this novel is perhaps closest to his own life and heart. A friend told him that “this is the book you’ve been wanting to write”, and it’s also the one he’s most enjoyed writing, he says. It shows; there is a tart playfulness to its frankness.
He is thinner than when we last met, at a freezing lit-fest in Richmond, and we reminisce about his beloved, handsome dog’s antics there. Dogs feature in one of this book’s wittiest passages. Michael, the main character, trundles off for a walk in the dangerous forests of autumnal Tuscany, where he encounters determined hunters who shoot at anything that moves in their quest for wild boar (an alarming season I vividly remember).
Their territorial attitude is, “tourist, bugger off”, and their overexcited dogs (who have a walk-on piece in this particular passage) add to the chaos by joining in the bedlam: “Bau bau, bau bau.”
Heyns talks about choosing to write the novel in an epistolary form, that is, a series of letters, from a rather pompous gay man (Michael) who grew up in Vasco, South Africa, and has achieved a smoothly polished life in Europe. He also has an elusive Italian father, and is taking a break from his hunky London lover (who, it turns out, is not so much taking a break as bolting) in a charming Tuscan hilled village, first popping in to Florence for the obligatory eyeball-popping art tour.
His holiday/quest wobbles off the rails early. At Stansted airport he is outraged by an elderly queue-jumper; his “insufferable snobbery” (quote Michiel) is ramped up when he’s seated next to a belligerent bovver-boy, Cedric, who keeps turning up in his Italian journey like a bad penny. “Chedric”, as the Italians call him (bit of a linguistic in-joke there), is your basic middle-class nightmare; a crass, self-proclaimed philistine, untainted by finesse – the very opposite of Michael’s hard-won veneer of polish.
The village also houses a handsome and feckless youth, Paolo, and an oddly Gothic couple, one of whom is the elderly Stansted queue-jumper and the other a woman who paints alarming canvases.
There is a serious side to the novel, says Heyns, for whom art matters. He talks about his love of great self-portraits (which I share), now subverted by narcissistic “selfies”, and, as he sees it, the nonsense of performance art. Caravaggio, that criminal artistic genius, is also purposefully invoked. Some of the naughtiest passages are the jumped-up narratives on fine art, which Heyns reveals are rewrites of actual catalogues.
It is Heyns’s most explicitly “gay” novel; “I decided, what the hell,” he shrugged. “Perhaps there will be those who don’t like that, but I respect that,” he adds. I don’t, I say, and think, not for the first time, that he is a kindlier person than me.
The twists in this tale skim the farcical, steadied by his experienced hand. It contains both come-uppance and redemption, with “Chedric” the unlikely hero. He is, perhaps, the one honest soul among them all, the Untouchable, a pugilistic lout from the loveless world of lower class London, who responds to the warmth of Tuscany while doggedly pricking pretentions. There is poignancy to his role, and even self-revelation.
Highly recommended.