In The Unspeakable,
set in the dusty northern provinces of South Africa in the last decades of
Apartheid, Peter Anderson invokes a number of literary precedents, but one in
particular, James Hadley Chase, whose novels are glimpsed in a roadside diner’s
book rack, kept coming back to mind as I read the main narrative thread of the novel.
There is a pulp-noir sexuality driving the story, as well as a cast of
characters (the professor, his pretty young girlfriend, a cameraman who is her former
lover, and a black sound technician and driver) whose interactions lead toward
a violent blowup.
The story is told in the voice of Rian, the cameraman, hired
to record the professor’s documentary film on the origins of the human race,
but the novel’s roadtrip through the South African wilderness also provokes
Rian’s memories of childhood on an Afrikaner farm, and these reminiscences are
vivid and evocative. Particularly in the longest of these flashbacks, dealing
with events leading up to the father’s suicide in front of his young son,
Anderson not only suggests some South African classics such as J.M. Coetzee but
also America’s Southern Gothic fiction, with its folkore and racism.
In the
best segments of Rian’s adult story, the casual racism of the white people
(Rian included) in contrast to the hardscrabble lives of tribal peoples
encountered along the way suggests another South African precedent, the
detective stories of James McClure, particularly in the direct portrait of lives
violently twisted in mental and behavioral ways by Apartheid.
But most of the
narrator’s main story depends on a series of adolescent fantasies and absurd actions
on the part of all the white principals, involving jealousies and overt sexual
proposals that are necessary for the plot to move to its tumultuous conclusion,
but are in themselves a bit hard to accept. Here again, a South African
precedent comes to mind, in Tom Sharpe’s lampoons of an Apartheid-era police
force, but Peterson’s characters are not drawn as broadly or with as much
comedy, and the contrast to the other parts of the story is jarring. At one
point, the professor (mostly portrayed as a buffoon) suggests the group abandon
the archaeological documentary to film instead an interracial porn film
featuring the girlfriend and the driver, which would be a dangerous act for the
driver in that era. And several acts of violence seem arbitrary and
unmotivated.
At one point the author, through his narrator, suggests that the
novel’s title refers to the possibility of addressing the unsayable by means of
stories, but there is also an unspeakable act at the end, a chilling indictment
of institutional racism (again reminding me of McClure’s evocation of
Apartheid), flowing directly from both the naturalistic and absurd elements of
the story, and its impact requires a reader to accept both at face value.