A life shaped by romance to a fading man

FICTION: The Shape of HimBy Gill Schierhout Cape, 210pp. £16.99

EVERY TWIST OF fate and irony, every turn a life can take – and does – stalks Sara Highbury. The weight of memory burdens her days and her brief experience of happiness settles into a travesty of retribution. South African Gill Schierhout imposes an austere intelligence and sense of regret on this remarkable narrative. If any novel published this year deserves to collect a truckload of honours, it is this one. No reader could be prepared for the complex tale that unfolds. It is a beautiful book, as bleak as love – or whatever it is that passes for love – and as heartbreaking.

As the story begins, Sara is 48 and aware of “this thing called aging happening to other people, but you do not think that it will happen to you and your contemporaries but it has”. She runs a boarding house. Her approach to it, and much else besides it, appears detached, life-weary. Her entire identity has been shaped by the romance she shared with Herbert Wakefield, a diamond digger who slowly began to lose his mind as a brain disease invaded it. He retreats into a hospital, which offers him some element of sanctuary. All she has are her memories and a quiet resolve.

Structured in fluid waves of memory, her narrative is a form of layered lamentation. Schierhout brilliantly explores the thoughts of a narrator who appears almost mesmerised by the strange horrors to which she becomes privy. And with those horrors comes a humiliation of sorts. Sara is a woman with no expectations and no apparent existence prior to her meeting Wakefield. “When I think of Herbert now, he seems to me to be more closely related to a stick insect than to a man. He seemed barely human, barely fertile.”

Her thoughts are precise yet often suggest a state of shock; she has been numbed by all that happened. Most interestingly, aside from a talent for sewing, she never reveals anything about her own history. Instead she is both witness and victim. “And I dared not ask myself why I had fallen for a man like this. Even a snail across a rock leaves a trail; not Herbert Wakefield, there was nothing about his life you could follow.”

As if she is giving evidence, she attempts to recall the early signs of his illness and admits to noticing little. “It was not the unsteadiness on his feet that bothered me, nor his anger, unpredictable like the gases underground ready to explode. No, it was the holes in his memory that I first became aware of. Herbert could not hide these, however delicately he squirmed.” Sara is a decent, unworldly individual, correct, formal, with a blunt, old-fashioned lyricism about her mode of expression.

She makes no play for our sympathy, yet wins it through her candour. “I am not a woman who seeks out the pleasures of the flesh in the way that some do. I did not come to Herbert in search of the comforts of the body.” She recalls with grateful surprise how the physical side of their relationship emerged: “It was as if something alighted on my shoulder that evening, the way beauty does – undeserved – a sort of grace.”

When Herbert disappears into his illness, Sara starts up a sewing business. She also begins another relationship – with Mr Amin Hafferjee. “A sensible sort of soul. He held down a good job in the factory, worked a regular day and harboured no fancies with stones.” For her, Hafferjee means “a relief from the sorrows that Herbert had brought”. Sara remains loyal to Herbert until she discovers that, while a patient in the hospital, he had fathered a child with a girl who had worked for Sara.

In Sara, Schierhout has created a devastatingly astute portrait of a woman whose life has been choreographed by events. Her hurt is real. “Herbert was certain that I would come to him. But I would not. I had no desire to see him after hearing of the birth of his child.” In time it is Sara who looks after the little girl. Her efforts to please the child are touching. Even more affecting is the moment she realises she has lost her special connection with the girl.

“I had once told Maggie that there was magic in nature. This I believed. And if you stood on a single thick clump of grass long enough with both your feet firmly planted, perhaps the energy of the grasses growing focused in that concentrated clump would grow you taller. For some months we had gone together to the edge of the veld beyond the road in Sallies Village to stand like this. I had not grown an inch . . . The memory stung, for I saw that the child had suddenly outgrown me.”

She is, of course, remarking on more than height. More truths dribble out about Herbert. Suddenly he is about to wed and his new wife plans to claim Maggie. This never comes to pass. The last truth to emerge is not all that unexpected. When Sara arrives at a convent to collect Maggie, who has been again abandoned, she is struck by how big the girl has become by the age of 12, and how uneasily Maggie, still a child, is responding to this increased physical size. Sara recalls the timid way Maggie said “I don’t mind staying here, if you don’t want me” and that she looked away as she spoke.

Sara corrects her for not looking at her, asking if she has lost her manners. Yet she is pleased when the girl reaches for her arm. Earlier in the narrative, when Sara remembers the silence that followed when Maggie had left her – supposedly to live with Herbert and his wife – Sara had regarded the child’s silence as a failure. “One of those unpleasant secrets about yourself you do not want others to know about.” The narrative voice is true to its period, which spans the 1920s up to 1945. Sara remembers everything, making sense of the various pieces of information through time and hindsight.

Herbert’s plight unfolds through a series of dramatic set-pieces, culminating in a finale that is as symbolic as it is dark. The prose is both abrupt and curiously elegant; the narrator conveys the pain she has suffered as well as the resignation she acquired along the way. In a very human account of lives faltering into upheaval, Schierhout has unpicked conventional narrative and created something special from a maze of experiences involving a small group of individuals.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of

The Irish Times