Book review: In A Strange Room

Published on Tuesday 13 April 2010 20:26

In A Strange Room BY Damon Galgut Atlantic Books, 180pp, £15.99

DAMON Galgut's new book is made up of three novellas, which have previously been published in the Paris Review. They all have the same narrator, who writes of himself sometimes in the third person and sometimes in the first. This might seem confusing and awkwardly contrived, but isn't. You might expect it to jar, and for a few pages it may do so, but not for long. It works because although the writing is all in the present tense, it is also presented as an exercise in memory and, looking back, the narrator sees himself as a character he is observing, and also as someone reliving the moments he is writing about. Only an author very firmly in control of his material could get away with this.

The first story, "The Follower", starts in Greece. One evening in Mycenae he meets a German called Reiner, by whom he is both attracted and repelled. They talk of doing a long walk together. Later, back in his native South Africa, the narrator gets a letter from Reiner saying "What about it?" Reiner arrives and they set out for Lesotho and walk and walk. Reiner is monomaniacal in his determination that everything shall be done the way he wants it. The narrator submits till at last there is a moment of rebellion. Two people who have been close, and who on several occasions have come near to giving the attraction they feel physical expression, are in the end separated utterly. Reviewing an earlier novel of Galgut's, I wrote that he has "the rare ability to show us how people develop as their perception of each other alters". That ability is to the fore in all these stories.

The second piece, "The Lover" is also set in Africa, but now north of the Republic. The narrator travels through Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania and Kenya. He meets groups of Europeans and Americans who are on the down-market tourist trail, backpackers and drop-outs. He is offered the chance of love by a handsome Swiss boy called Jerome, never quite brings himself to accept the gift. He is restless, "knotted up" is his expression. "He has always been drawn by the strangeness of places, by what he doesn't know instead of what he does… Things happens once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory." Galgut writes about the uncanny reality of memories which alter the past even while they seek to recover it.

In the third story he is "The Guardian". He has agreed to take his old friend Anna to India. She is in a bad way, mentally and psychologically, and has spent time in a clinic. The trip is supposed to help her recover, and she has promised that she will take her medication as prescribed and will abstain from alcohol. She has no intention, as it soon becomes obvious, of keeping her side of the bargain. Her condition is far worse than he supposed, and she is suicidal. He struggles to keep her going, experiences exasperation as the strain tells, hates her sometimes, as one may hate a rebellious dependent. There are horrific scenes in an Indian hospital, but there are also moments of unlooked-for kindness and the comfort and support that may be offered by strangers, from sheer goodness of heart. The story is deeply moving and terrible, as it reveals how gaps between people who love each other may open so wide as to be unbridgeable. It is quite devoid of sentimentality; Galgut shows us the complete solipsism of the mentally disturbed.

These stories are low-key and subtle. Galgut writes with a beautiful sense of the visible world, and an acute understanding of how people relate, or fail to relate, to each other. Most of his characters are seeking to find more in life than they feel they have been offered. Attempts at self-realisation may damage others, as the narrator is damaged by Reiner, obsessed by what he believes necessary for his self-fulfilment, harshly indifferent to the wishes or needs of others. Likewise the backpacking drop-outs of the second tale live in their own selfish cocoon; the native peoples of the countries they pass through scarcely exist for them indeed except sometimes as irritants. Galgut is, however, a writer of wide sympathies: he shows us people, in the third Indian tale, going out of their way to help others when there is no possibility, or indeed thought, of personal advantage. The world portrayed is often cruel and corrupt, but there is still room, welcome room, for simple kindness.

Yet the narrator comes to know "that lightning can strike out of a clear blue sky, and take away everything you've built, everything you've counted on, leaving wreckage and no meaning behind. It can happen to anyone, it can happen to you."