Up Against the Night review: white South African back in the mother land

Up Against the Night

Author: Justin Cartwright

ISBN-13: 978-1408858226

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Guideline Price: £18.99

History at its most ambivalent emerges as the prevailing theme of this clever novel from the consistently astute and witty Justin Cartwright. Born and raised in South Africa, Cartwright moved to Britain as a student and settled there. Since then he has written several of the most assured middle-class English novels of recent years.

Irony is Cartwright’s natural medium, and he surveys humans with a benign if all-seeing caustic eye. Put bluntly, Cartwright is better than many when it comes to writing peculiarly English novels. (A similar observation was initially made about William Trevor at the beginning of his career, when critics assumed he was English.)

There is a savvy fluency about Cartwright’s visual, descriptive prose and linguistic ease. If he possesses a weakness, it is one in common with Margaret Atwood: he is a bit too intelligent and insufficiently self- serious to be fully engaged in merely making up stories about the things people do. He constantly wrong-foots the reader, neatly shifting between the profound and the banal. It is as if he is a rugby player so bored by the fumbling efforts of his dim team-mates that he refuses to pass the ball and simply smiles serenely at the frustration of others.

Cartwright enjoys jokes; his characters often exchange dialogue so corny it sounds real. He is unafraid of cliches and, for a writer with a flair for characterisation he also revels in insightful caricatures. His finest set pieces frequently take place in crowded social settings.

Yet Up Against the Night, his 13th novel, is different. It is as accomplished as any of his previous books, although Masai Dreaming (1993), In Every Face I Meet (1995) and the semi-autobiographical White Lightning (2002) are superior. He demonstrated how well he could adapt source material with The Song Before It Is Sung (2007), based on the assassination attempt on Hitler by a group of Prussian officers. Cartwright brought to it a study of the real-life friendship between British philosopher Isaiah Berlin and German diplomat Adam von Trott. Lion Heart (2013) is about a dead father's obsession with Richard I.

Haunted by history

Up Against the Night

also looks to historical fact and is important because Cartwright the outsider/insider returns to South Africa. It leaves no doubt as to exactly how much his country continues to preoccupy him. There is also the reality of his love for it, which is tender if wary. South Africa’s beauty moves him, while its history and politics certainly embarrass him. What may not have been clear until now is exactly how much of its history haunts him.

The novel opens with a prologue of sorts, the massacre of Boer leader Piet Retief in 1838 by the Zulu warriors of King Dingane. It was a shocking episode, witnessed by a missionary, his wife, their servant and a young boy. Retief was left alive long enough to see his 13-year-old son clubbed to death.

Cartwright is a descendant of Retief, as is Frank, the laconic central character. Frank is rich and back in love, if still reeling from the ongoing tirades of his ex-wife. The South African sequences are fascinating, particularly the descriptions of the landscapes and the animal life, as well as the very real dangers all too often ignored by careless humans.

At one point Frank, a man with more than enough money for everyone, including Jaco, his wayward cousin, admits to being a tour guide when it comes to South Africa. Cartwright is certainly that. The distance he has acquired from the South Africa of his youth and the country it has now become makes this novel fascinating for his insights. As always Cartwright counters his love of information and detail with his refined lightness of touch.

In late middle age, Frank is taking stock; his former wife is a demon, his grown daughter is a recovering – he hopes – drug addict, and his current love is an adoring, somewhat younger Swedish divorcee committed to happy endings. He has homes in London and the New Forest, while his South African beach house could well be paradise.

Frank has everything. His girlfriend doesn’t simply put flowers into a vase – it is “a blue-tinged Kosta Boda vase: a swirling blue infiltrates the clear glass in streams, like offshoots of the Northern Lights”. Frank uses words such as “fruitcake” to describe his ex-wife’s former beau, and “enchanting” and “enchanted”.

It should be easy to hate Frank, but it’s not. Cartwright gives him a sense of humour and an awareness of popular culture to balance the amount of literary and art history references.

There is also a lingering humility in the way Frank admits that “much of what I know has come to me as a gift from books. I have relied heavily on books to understand the world”. Elsewhere, he admits to loving beauty and he has surrounded himself with beautiful things. It is interesting to see a male novelist engaging so intensely with domestic furnishings.

Even before the action moves to South Africa, Frank engages with his memories of a boyhood dominated by the early death of his mother and his relationship with a distracted father. Beyond the love banter he reserves for his girlfriend, who seems doll-like and besotted, are the intriguing reflections on his mixed feelings about his ancestor:

“Retief – cloaked in righteousness, blessed by God, free of his creditors – had undoubtedly arrived in this land in order to take it. And despite the fact that he was still just about living on the cusp of prehistory, Dingane understood what was in store for his people. His conversation with Hully [a trader and translator] confirms it, and the subsequent history of South Africa bears witness to the fact that whites seldom observed the treaties they had made.”

Frank’s tone is conversational and reasonable. His narrative is occasionally interspersed with frenetic interludes from a secondary narrative, which features the scrambled thoughts of his distant cousin, Jaco, a semi-articulate yob worthy of Martin Amis.

Jaco’s first appearance is via YouTube, when by chance Frank comes across footage of a man grappling with a shark. It is hilarious. The volatile, child-like Jaco never disappoints; he dutifully sets off to the US to join the Scientologists. Before very long he is begging his rich cousin, whom he insists on calling uncle, to rescue him.

Seriously funny

Cartwright favours well structured plots; he invariably evokes a sense of the daily chaos of ordinary living. He can be serious, but he is also very funny.

Other People’s Money

(2011), about a private banking scandal, is a black comedy.

Lucinda, Frank’s recovering addict daughter, joins him in South Africa accompanied by a small black child who is not hers. This is one of the more limp threads, as is a blossoming, rather wet teen romance. But Jaco’s progression from clown to saviour is a wicked twist born of an inventive use of chance.

Cartwright does not ignore the every day violence of life. This entertaining, very human novel about one man’s darkest thoughts has a serious heart rooted in a history that refuses to go away.

EileenBattersby is Literary Correspondent