Although Jamalee has womanish charms and assets beyond her tomato-red hair—assets to which Sam Barlach is not immune—the looker in Woodrell’s novel isn’t whom you might expect. It’s not Jamalee or her mom, Bev, a woman of questionable taste and morals, but Jason. Jason, blessed with drop-dead good looks, is the categorical object of local female desire. It is on this commodity that Jamalee plans to trade in order that they might escape the gray inertia of Venus Holler and West Table. Nice plan in a fantasy world, but not one with much chance of success. It’s a child’s scheme born of desperation and a desire for escape. Problem is, the plan, which even under the best of circumstances was unlikely to produce the desired result, has a fundamental flaw. Jason may well be desired by women, but he isn’t desirous of them, not any of them. Talk about helping your fate along . . . For me, it is reminiscent of the utterly doomed and ridiculous scheme of the bank robbers in Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon. That film, by the way, was closely based on an actual robbery. I’m sure it seemed like a good idea to rob a bank in order to fund a sex-change operation. No doubt Jamalee Merridew would have agreed and Sammy Barlach would have gone along for the ride.
Beyond what I have already written, I won’t reveal any more about the novel. I get the sense that the more I write, the farther away I get from capturing the essence of this incredible work of fiction. Please pick up a copy of this novel and let yourself be taken out of your life and transported to a place you have never been to before. In my classes and during my book talks, I often say that writers can be at a disadvantage vis-à-vis filmmakers. Filmmakers, I explain, have words, images, sound tracks, special effects—a whole host of tools in their toolbox. All a writer has in his toolbox are words. In the hands of Daniel Woodrell, words are more than enough. In Tomato Red, those words are magic.
Called “a hard-boiled poet” by NPR’s Maureen Corrigan and “the noir poet laureate” in the Huffington Post, Reed Farrel Coleman has published fifteen novels. He is a three-time recipient of the Shamus Award for Best P. I. Novel of the Year and is a two-time Edgar Award nominee. He has also won the Macavity, Barry, and Anthony awards. He is an adjunct professor of English at Hofstra University and a founding member of MWA University. He lives with his family on Long Island. Visit him online at www.reedcoleman.com.
Disgrace
by J. M. Coetzee (1999)
MARGIE ORFORD
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John Maxwell Coetzee (b. 1940) is a South African–born writer and academic. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, and has won the Man Booker Prize for two novels, Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Disgrace (1999). He now lives in Australia.
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I stand next to the corpse of a twelve-year-old. The girl is laid out on a steel tray. She has been raped. Before, during, or after, she has been stabbed one hundred and three times. It takes an intentional vigor to do that, a vigor that is born from power, from a clear-eyed hatred. It is a disgrace.
Standing in the chill air of that Cape Town mortuary five years ago, I thought of Disgrace, the novel by South Africa’s most celebrated author, J. M. Coetzee. Disgrace is a violent book—its moments of great tenderness notwithstanding—that is shaped by Coetzee’s bleakly ethical questing in a violent country. It was Coetzee, a literary writer reminiscent of Beckett, of Kafka, who addressed the issue of crime in the new South Africa in all its unadorned and incomprehensible brutality.
“What if after an attack like that, one is never oneself again?” the protagonist in Disgrace asks himself. “What if an attack like that turns one into a different and darker person altogether?” What if, indeed? It is a haunting question; it is the question that has informed my own writing, which is, on one level, an exploration of violence and survival.
Coetzee is an austere writer and Disgrace tells a simple story. David Lurie, the protagonist, is a fifty-two-year-old professor in Cape Town. He has an affair with a pretty young student and, after she makes a complaint against him, he loses his job. Shunned by colleagues and friends, he seeks refuge with his daughter, Lucy, on her remote smallholding in the Eastern Cape. This ambiguous sanctuary—Lurie has little talent for agrarian life—is shattered when three strangers, two men and a boy, arrive one afternoon. During a vicious attack, Lurie is doused with methylated spirits, set alight, then locked in the bathroom. His daughter is gang-raped. Before they leave, the Luries’ assailants shoot Lucy’s penned dogs, and take everything of value with them. They will never be arrested. Lucy is pregnant as a result of the rape. Lurie wants his daughter to fight, to go to the police, to maintain the fiction of justice and retribution, and to turn in the predatory boy when he returns to skulk about on Lucy’s farm. She refuses. She is “like a dead person.” Lurie, after returning briefly to Cape Town, moves back to the Eastern Cape where he volunteers at an animal welfare clinic whose main business it is to euthanize unwanted dogs.
While treating his burns in the immediate aftermath of the attack, Lurie muses on the theory that crime is nothing more than a Robin Hood–like redistribution of assets, a facile theory that posits that it is “not human evil, just a vast circulatory system to whose workings pity and terror are irrelevant.” Pity and terror, which Coetzee evokes in equal measure in Disgrace, are grand, archaic emotions that one associates with Greek tragedy, with the hubris of its heroic figures, with the catharsis that results when they fall.
Pity and terror were what I felt when I first read Disgrace. Pity and terror were what I felt that morning as I stood beside the twelve-year-old girl’s violated corpse. Pity for her, and terror at what is unleashed when a man, a society, capitulates to the lure of violence.
The edition of Disgrace, from which all the quotes in this essay are taken, is the original U.S. hardback edition. I bought it in 1999, the year I left South Africa to take up a two-year scholarship in New York City, the first time I had an opportunity to reflect away from my turbulent, beloved country. The jacket of that first edition is a virginal white apart from Coetzee’s name in looped, blue cursive on the top, and “Disgrace” in small black type in the center.
I wondered about it at the time: that Disgrace, in its first public outing, was visually silent. It struck me then—it still does—as a graphic indication of the lacuna into which crime and its writing falls. That blank cover seemed to suggest that, even though the novel itself is a form of representation, there is a level at which violence is impossible—or too disturbing—to represent. At a point, it is impossible to bear witness to the horror of violation. Yet the people who do survive violence—“it happens every day, every hour, every minute, Lurie tells himself, in every quarter of the country”—must find a way to endure, to pick up what is left of themselves, to carry on living.
David Lurie, a man shunned for having taken advantage of his age, his position, his power and prestige in seducing a student and then refusing to hear her accusation, must endure his own helplessness when his daughter is violated. Later, too, he must endure the accusation—outrageous to him—that he does not, cannot, know what his daughter suffered.
What more could he have witnessed than he is capable of imagining? Or do they think that, where rape is concerned, no man can be where the woman is? Whatever the answer, he is outraged at being treated like an outsider.
But Lurie is a man, and this fact makes him, in the eyes of the female characters in the book, an outsider. Vengeance, action, abandoning the farm, are the options he offers his daughter, who is catatonic with shock, stunned by the hatred that her assailants—men she has never met before—felt for her. Lucy, however, refuses all of her father’s pleas. Obdurately, she refuses to leave her land; she refuses the option of aborting her hate-conceived fetus.
In Coetzee’s writing of Lucy’s story, Lurie has no access, beyond a certain point, to what Lucy endures, to the reasons behind her decision (a passive one, leading to a greatly reduced life), to her choice of survival strategy. This was the narrative lacuna in Disgrace that fascinated me. I wanted to write
into that silence, that imaginative blind spot.
If violence does have a grammar, and therefore a meaning, then the crimes represented in Disgrace are, in essence, violent conversations between men about land, possession, revenge, and access to women. The bodies of women are, in a profound sense, incidental, the women themselves either silenced or inaudible. And yet, as Lurie insists, “There must be a niche in the system for women and what happens to them.”
In my writing I have tried to locate that niche. I have tried to find ways to imagine Lucy’s story, to find the truth of her experience. I did not accept the fiction created by Coetzee that Lucy would accept this forced-into-her child, the child of one of her three rapists. There was something in me that said no, that is not how it would happen. That child—that product of historical hate—would not atone for anything that Lucy’s father, and what he represented, may have done. It would not atone for the past. It certainly would not release her to live on the land freely as she wished to live.
Lucy would, I imagined, or perhaps I only hoped, resist.
The questions that have framed my writing are simple. Why is contemporary South Africa so violent? Is violence a consequence of our history? Is violence what happens when law and morality are uncoupled from what is right, as happened under apartheid? Why do some men hate women so? Why do they rape? Why do they kill? Is it revenge? Is it for fun? Is it some ghastly combination of all these things? Why won’t it stop? How do we carry on?
For Coetzee, the answers are complicated. “The real truth, he [Lurie] suspects, is something far more—he casts around for the word—anthropological, something it would take months to get to the bottom of, months of patient, unhurried conversation with dozens of people, and the offices of an interpreter.”
The crime novel, if done well, is a way of interpreting the society on which it focuses its lens. Coetzee’s notion (one that is never pursued by Lurie) of accessing the “real truth” (if there is such a thing) through a kind of anthropological investigation appealed to me. So did the idea of an interpreter, for the investigators that populate crime fiction can be very astute social interpreters.
The impulse of the crime novel may be described as anthropological. The genre attempts to understand what men do, and why they do it; the investigative crime novel asks questions of a range of people who might or might not know something about an act of violence. And I felt sure that I could put my shoulder to the genre and shift the questions sufficiently to make them work also for a woman.
Crime fiction, especially noir fiction, is a genre that, since its hard-boiled inception with writers like Raymond Chandler, has shown women their place in no uncertain terms. There is, in much noir fiction, a delight in the torture and murder of women. The demonization of the woman as the femme fatale can make it appear that any fate that befalls her is, in some fundamental sense, her just desserts. Misogyny is part of the grammar of crime fiction, as if the male hero, so central to the genre, is premised on a dead or silenced woman. Despite its roots—or perhaps because of them—crime fiction is a genre that is capable of revealing the workings of the psyche, and the masculine psyche in particular.
Crime fiction is, however, a flexible genre that can be bent enough out of shape to tell women’s stories, too. It can even exact a woman’s fictional revenge. Creating a female investigator has enabled me to explore that silence that lies at the heart of Disgrace, at the heart of South Africa, and to try to find some answers to my own questions.
Disgrace, a literary novel, opened my eyes to this possibility. Lurie is emasculated during the attack; unable to save his daughter, unable to avenge himself or her (as would happen in a typical crime novel). Crucially, he is unable to bend Lucy to his will and make her do what he thinks is best for her.
Adrift in the aftermath of the attack, he takes it upon himself to carry the carcasses of maltreated animals to the hospital incinerator so that he can ensure they are disposed of in a dignified way. He rents a room near this charnel house, comforting the very animals that he will shortly help to kill. The dogs are terrified when the allotted day comes. They know what is going to happen to them. They fear what Coetzee calls the “disgrace of dying.”
I thought about what Lurie was doing with those dead dogs. Lurie’s accompaniment of the dog carcasses mirrored what the plot of the crime novel does so compulsively with the corpse. The crime novel “accompanies” a corpse to its end, to its truth. It tries to find a way to decipher the grammar of the violence suffered in order to avenge the wrongs done to the once living person. The investigation, the forensic ferreting is, in a postreligious age, the only way we have of honoring and avenging the dead—indeed, of bearing witness—and of hiding from ourselves the disgrace of dying violently.
Coetzee’s Disgrace offers pity and terror, but it is not a novel that offers either solace or comfort. The crime novel, on the other hand, with its cathartic rituals of resolution and serial repetition, acts like Perseus’s mirror. It offers a way of looking at violence, at violation, at death, and surviving. That, at least, is some kind of solace.
Journalist and writer Margie Orford is at the forefront of a new generation of South African mystery writers. She has written four acclaimed novels featuring criminal profiler Dr. Clare Hart, the latest of which is Gallows Hill. She is executive vice president of South African PEN and a patron of both the Rape Crisis Trust in Cape Town and Little Hands Trust, a children’s book charity. She lives in Cape Town. Visit her online at www.margieorford.com.
A Small Death in Lisbon
by Robert Wilson (1999)
SHANE MALONEY
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Robert Wilson (b. 1957) is a British-born crime writer who has largely eschewed his homeland as territory for his novels, choosing instead to write about Benin, West Africa, for his early Bruce Medway series, and Seville, Spain, the setting for his Javier Falcón books. He has won numerous awards, including the CWA Gold Dagger for the nonseries novel A Small Death in Lisbon.
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Robert Wilson was once a shea nut broker, and his fiction covers a wide swath of territory, often venturing into places where few crime writers in English have ever set foot. His first four novels were Graham Greene–ish intrigues set in West Africa, and voiced by a booze-soaked expat fixer named Bruce Medway. Sweat-sticky stuff, they play out in a miasma of corruption punctuated with vivid flashes of casual brutality—a checkpoint made of stacked corpses, dope-crazed boys with AK-47s—that take noir deep into the heart of the Dark Continent. His African books were followed by two novels set in wartime Portugal, A Small Death in Lisbon and The Company of Strangers, an espionage story. Next came four police procedurals in which Javier Falcón, Inspector Jefe of the Seville Homicide squad, pits himself against financial corruption, the Russian mafia, Islamic terrorists, and a fair quantity of tapas.
For my money, A Small Death in Lisbon is the pick of the crop. It taught me everything I know about the politics of wolfram and the financial underpinnings of the Estado Novo. The pace is fast, the style economical, the politics sound, the heat palpable. Even the most shopworn minor characters have a real presence. Nobody is entirely blameless. If not for the Nazi gold and the bullets in the back of the head, you might almost call it literature.
A Small Death comes down the same ratline employed by Martin Cruz Smith, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Philip Kerr, and Robert Harris—novelists whose fictitious crimes come wrapped in layers of real history, where politics is a matter of life and death, and violence reverberates through the generations in often unpredictable ways. Part historical thriller, part police procedural, it posits a mystery that can only be unraveled by following a chain of causation that leads all the way back to the darkest core of the twentieth century.
We start in Berlin in 1941, in the certain knowledge that the Third Reich is riding for a fall. Klaus Felsen, a small-scale manufacturer, is making easy money supplying the German war machine with railway couplings. When the SS invites him in for a chat and makes him
an offer he can’t refuse, he finds himself undertaking a secret mission in Portugal. His orders are to ensure a steady supply of wolfram, the ore form of tungsten, a strategic material needed to produce armor-piercing shells for the tank divisions already warming their engines for the imminent invasion of the Soviet Union.
Although Felsen is a schmoozer, a profiteer, and a womanizer, he’s not particularly likeable, even when he’s beating the downright evil SS Gruppenführer Lehrer in a game of poker. But like him or not, we’re stuck holding his tailored coattails when he arrives in Lisbon, the capital of a neutral country ruled by a Fascist dictator, a city swarming with spies.
Meanwhile, in a parallel plot, it’s six decades later. Portugal is still in the process of emerging from the Salazar dictatorship. A teenage girl from a well-off family has been raped and murdered. The investigation falls to Inspector Zé Coelho, a homicide cop with a daughter the same age as the dead girl. In the time-honored manner of the cantankerous dick, Coelho carries his own historical baggage. He was both an opponent of the dictatorship and the son of an army officer who participated in an attempted coup d’état against the unruly democracy that succeeded it. A widower who spent part of his life in exile, he’s a cop by default, not vocation. He works in an atmosphere of induced social amnesia, the let-sleeping-dogs-lie consensus that has replaced the euphoria of the 1974 Carnation Revolution, the military coup that ended the dictatorship. By contrast, his rookie sidekick has carried his own family’s leftist politics across the generational divide. He thinks that consumerism sucks, and Coelho’s father should have been shot.
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