Formulaic: Dreaming the Impossible Dream

Andre Brink knows what has to go into a picaresque novel: he has the naive protagonist who is "enlightened" at the end, if also dead; he has sex, even though it is more of a list of names than peeking through a key hole; he has a corrupt political system. He cleverly has the protagonist's traveling companion be an imaginary "friend," St. Joan of Arc. His love interest is a native black slave whose leg iron he removes, never to see her again; she becomes all of South Africa, and Etienne atones for all of the Dutch East India Company's sins in his quest to find her.

What is sorely lacking is any hit of humor, ribald or not. Without that tongue-in-cheek perspective, I cannot say this is a top rung picaresque novel. "Hamagrael" was home this week and she has read a lot of Brink's contemporary stories about apartheid and likes him a lot. On the Contrary does not intrigue me enough to want to read anything else he has written, although there were several paragraphs I dog-eared as either classic picaro or powerfully written.

St. Joan articulates the need to fight against petty political corruption: "... This is the sin of all of them, all the men who turn to politics as a game to be played, a game of the possible. They become powerful because they fetter the imagination. That is the very source of their power. They forbid us to remember what is truly possible. And by concentrating only on the possible, ... they have made the world an impossible place to live in."

At another point in Etienne's discourses with Joan, she personifies Brink's view of style and content: "I could literally invent myself through what I chose to tell. I could cancel myself by remaining silent. Or I could create whole multitudes of me through different stories. From that moment I had control over my destiny." This section also foretells Rosette, whose entire portrait is that of a native story teller, one who escapes torture and death like Scheherazade by enthralling her audiences in myths.

For its depiction of darkest Africa being explored by a white man, On the Contrary can be set against TC Boyle's Mungo Park. Etienne late in Part 2 concludes: "I understood at last something of what I'd been living with those past months: this violence, this energy, this seemingly exuberant cruelty, this need to subdue all adversaries real and imagined by brute force, this passion to destroy. All of it sprang not from exaggerated confidence, not even from hate, but from terror: the fear of this vast land, of its spaces, of its unmerciful light, of what lay lurking in this light, of its dark people."

The book is meaty and informative, but not engaging, the propaganda bleeds through too obviously. While I was reading this, I was also reading Toqueville Discovering America. Brink, at least in this novel, does not have the intellectual perspective or distance to look disinterestedly at his country's infancy. He skillfully uses the picaresque genre to continue his anti-apartheid crusade, but Etienne does not emerge as vividly has his hidalgo hero.