A blooming shame

It seems that the blurb of each new book published locally, whether fiction or non-fiction, claims to represent the state of South Africa today in stark, unprecedented honesty. And more often than not it is a country depicted either as shackled to its past or with the key to its manacles in its bloodied fingers. Black Petals by Bryan Rostron is another such novel, one which understands the past as a tangle of secrets that only recede further as one approaches, and the present as just as illusory.

Black Petals by Bryan Rostron
Publisher: Jacana / ISBN: 9781770096486 / Price: R165.00

The premise of Black Petals is an ambitious one. An archivist and former activist is working on a top-secret project when he discovers his own apartheid security files among the piles to be catalogued. Intrigued enough to abandon protocol and his own sense of self-preservation by stealing and examining first one file and then a second, Macaulay Vogel is shaken by the unfamiliar self (denoted as CCR10/32 and branded a traitor) who emerges from between the lime green folders.

Vogel’s journey through the haunted woods of identity is complicated by the agendas of an assortment of damaged, angry, shady and sincere comrades who all seem to demand the same thing from him: information. From Susan Sarkissian, his best friend’s wife, to union leader Marc Hendricks, to confidants Zecharia and Mary Xaba. And then of course there is the mysterious figure of Marda, made tangible only through the bouquets of flowers that Vogel buys in her memory.

All this soul searching is set to the score of marches and bombs, overset with the ringing the motto of "files have a life of their own". "They won’t stay buried," says Vogel ominously. "It’s like the bones, you see. One day, they’ll just work their own way to the surface." And just like Rostron’s persistent and often jarring metaphors about petals, to which everything is compared, including the weather.

Black Petals, although a sincere attempt at creating a detective novel that traverses the legacy of the past, is best summarised in this series of failed metaphors.

Our intrepid author becomes lost on his journey, never quite nearing his plotted destination. The novel is dogged by a feeling of familiarity, as it traces plots and themes extracted from other novels and short stories, yet never extends them, and confines its characters to the roles cast for them by the South African media. And in the end, existential questions so subtly raised in the promising first chapter are never answered, leaving the reader with the sense, not that we are being asked to recognise that there can be no definitive answers, but only that perhaps the author himself doesn’t know what they are.

Compared with the crop of good South African crime fiction (most of which, for some reason, is set against the slopes of Table Mountain) being released by the likes of Mike Nicol, Deon Meyer and Margie Orford, which manages to satisfy the requirements of a good thriller while still raising pertinent questions about South Africa past and present, Black Petals merely wanders listlessly through old, abandoned territory. It is, in short, a blooming shame.

If you enjoyed this book, you should read: Bryan Rostron’s first novel, My Shadow, which was commended for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Africa), and his non-fiction work, Till Babylon Falls.