Sheila Fugard

This is a very odd thing from the early eighties: a non-realistic avant-garde three act play thinly disguised as a historical novel. Or novella, maybe: it's less than 150 pages long, anyway. Characters deliver long passionate speeches to each other or to the audience, you can practically see the lights going up and down on them as they step forward to speak, and it's all performed to the backing of a hypnotic (virtual) soundtrack by Ravi Shankar with a strong whiff of incense in the background.

We're supposedly in an obscure dorp in the Karoo in 1920, where the narrator, Christina Ransome, is teaching the "coloured" children of the location. She's a Red Revolutionary, a disciple of Gandhi, and a feminist, attributes not calculated to make her popular with her Boer neighbours (and only the Hindu-mystical part of them is developed to any extent). She also has a love affair with an Indian man behind her, as well as a very sexual kind of obsession with her late lover's teenage wife, Lakshmi ("Her breasts undulated beneath the sari ... her face was an open lotus ... she was a woman ready for copulation. A tantric goddess."). The words lingam and yoni pop up every two or three pages.

The action of the book turns around Miss Ransome's star pupil, the seventeen-year-old coloured boy Ebrahim. He is caught in bed with a Boer girl and accused of rape. The girl is fourteen and has learning difficulties, so even the local version of Gregory Peck (fresh from studying Egyptian papyruses in Leiden, evidently a key part of every criminal lawyer's toolkit) is going to have a hard time helping him. And of course a Boer lynch-party turns up, and things start getting even odder than they were before.

Probably not a book it would be advisable to attempt to tackle without a good supply of seventies psychoactive substances and a sitar to hand. I'm not quite sure what Fugard was trying to achieve with this book, but I don't think she did so, whatever it was.… (altro)