On the brink of good taste

As early as the opening pages of this bizarre love story, the narrator, Ruben Olivier, widower and retired librarian, is resisting suggestions to change his lonely life in a violent Capetown suburb. The idea of taking in lodgers horrifies him. "No students in this house. Coming and going and boozing and smoking and fornicating and playing loud music day and night. Thanks, but no thanks." His family is concerned, as is Magrieta, his old housekeeper, who has tended him like a mother for 38 years. Olivier quickly, almost too quickly, emerges as a private, selfish man who has lived his life largely through books.

One of the many problems undermining Brink's efforts towards making his character human, sympathetic, or even believable, is the unconvincing situation he places Olivier in. Here is a man with a well-developed sense of self preservation who is so alert to danger he even ignores a battered person lying on the road. The victim turns out to be his best friend and after the man recovers, Olivier never confesses his failure to act. His friend later dies after his initial attacker returns to finish the job. Having finally agreed to take in lodgers, Olivier refuses to consider a coloured couple in case it upsets the neighbours. Instead he takes in a dishevelled young woman who arrives late and barefoot for her interview.

Within minutes of meeting her he has informed the young woman that he is not divorced, that his wife is dead, and that his only daughter died before birth. The prospective lodger promptly asks, "What do you do for sex?" That the cautious, remote, respectable narrator does not invite her to leave there and then is about the only surprise on offer in a disappointing novel which clumsily sets out to explore sexual power games. Much of the rest is cliched, and embarrassingly pitched at an unconvincing level of candour. The girl Tessa, who appears to be a pathological liar, refuses to have sex with the panting narrator, who has begun to live in a state of constant arousal, while she happily keeps him informed as to the orgasms she has with the other men she brings into his house.

At no time is rent mentioned. Tessa takes over the house - which is also haunted, by the way - though sex in withheld for the good of their "relationship" ("good" because Olivier and Tessa discuss her sex life and his desires with chat-show directness). Age is also a constant theme. Olivier is aware of being 65 and no longer confident of his physical prowess: sex for him is a fantasy sustained by staring at Tessa's body which, for her, seems to be a combination of weapon and tool.

Having never had time for his own children, nor indeed for his grandchildren, Olivier manages to meekly stand by and worship fretfully as his muse Tessa conducts herself with the defiant abandon of a headstrung teenager reducing his house to a student squat. She is, in fact, 30. Olivier sets out to indulge her as a daughter while lusting after her and engaging in endlessly pondering his obsession. "But what was it, then? If I tried to discount (but how could I?) her unkempt beauty, her shop-soiled innocence, her eyes, the tone of her voice, that laugh - what else was there? Ah, but the blatant sexiness was blended with un-self-conscious grace, with surprising control; if she seemed lost and bewildered, she was coolly efficient and professional in dealing with my computer."

Every fact presented by Tessa is a lie; her family history, her father's death, the job she claims to have. It would take a writer with the linguistic powers and wit of a Nabokov or an Updike to render so weak a plot credible. And even then it would be difficult, without comic dialogue of genius. Tessa lives out her belated hippie adolescence complete with dope, drink and random sex. The narrator peruses her body as if it were a map of the Promised Land. A crisis is reached when one of Tessa s sleep-in-lovers expects the old housekeeper to wash his underpants.

Nothing, however, seems too much for Olivier, drugged by desire and grateful to Tessa - whom he sees as granting him "no mercy" and having shown him "a way to love". His long meditations are mawkish and cloying, if preferable to the sexual banter he exchanges with Tessa. All the while in the background is the violence tearing Capetown apart as gangs rape and kill.

Yet Andre Brink, twice Booker shortlisted, never a prose stylist, is a major writer. While not as gifted as his fellow South African J.M. Coetzee, one of the finest novelists in the world, Brink has previously written powerfully and convincing about sexuality, particularly that of the male Afrikaner, as in his finest novel Rumours of Rain (1978). By attempting to write a less stark, more obviously human novel than Coetzee's magnificent Disgrace (1999), Brink flounders into a voyeuristic yarn featuring a narrator with an appetite for unusually masochistic humiliation.

South Africa's history has always attracted Brink and it provided the structural and thematic framework of many of his novels including An Instant in the Wind (1976), A Chain of Voices (1982) and On the Contrary (1993). Sexual politics and power shifts have also preoccupied him - which makes his ineptitude here all the more bewildering. Running in tandem with the street violence in The Rights of Desire is the story of the young slave girl executed some 300 years before the narrative begins and whose ghost haunts Olivier's house.

Her story is also one of sexual abandon. Magrieta the housekeeper has come to know the young ghost well and trusts her judgment. With the introduction of the friendly ghost who carries her head under her arm, though occasionally she will re-position it on her shoulders, the reader is left not knowing whether to laugh or cry. Probably because Brink feels he is providing insights into female sexuality throughout this book, the young slave girl is eventually portrayed as more sexual protagonist than victim.

Olivier himself also believes in the ghost girl and has researched the history surrounding her death. He later finds her bones under the floorboards and reassembles her skeleton. The ghostly side-show is about as unconvincing and ambiguous as is much else in this weak romance which lacks even a trace of genuine emotion and proves as unsubtle as it is cliched. Olivier's rite of passage from complacency, to lust and on to self-knowledge is curiously hollow but fails more through the appallingly crass characterisation of Tessa than by his own limitations. The Rights of Desire is Brink's worst novel, lacking both depth and conviction: it is also his oddest.

Eileeen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times