kagablog

Every now and again a novel rises out of the slew of new fiction titles and makes a claim on one’s attention that is extraordinary. Trencherman by Eben Venter is such a novel.

Published in Afrikaans in 2006 as Horrelpoot – to wide critical acclaim, and to some controversy, too – it is quite simply the most devastating fictional account of apocalyptic South African collapse yet written, and it has been superbly translated into SA English by Luke Stubbs.

Novels of apocalypse (or ‘dystopia’) in local fiction are a well-established tradition, many of them incorporating anti-pastoral variations of the farm novel. These novels include Karel Schoeman’s Na die Geliefde Land (translated into English as Promised Land), Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People, and several of J.M. Coetzee’s novels (specifically In the Heart of the Country, Life & Times of Michael K, Waiting for the Barbarians, and Disgrace).

However, none of them travels quite as deeply, and quite as startlingly, into the very heart of livid, psychic fear, into the focal point of horror and the terror of dissolution – collapse of every known system and quantity – as does Trencherman.

Venter is a hard-hitting writer, and deeply contemptuous of political correctness. But he is also a lyrical, subtle writer with a developed literary sense.

Trencherman is a deliberate rewriting of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Its narrating character, Marlouw (Martin Louw), a SA émigré living in the over-refined, ‘sepulchral city’ of Melbourne, is convinced by his sister, Heleen, to go back to South Africa to find her lost son, Koert.

All of this is a replay of Conrad’s Marlow going on a riverboat journey into the Congo, into the ‘heart of darkness’, to find Kurtz. Each chapter in Venter’s novel is introduced by an epigraph from Conrad’s novel.

In Trencherman, however, the unspecified future South Africa is a scene of abysmal collapse and dark chaos not simply in realistic terms, but more so as the stark realisation of the deepest, most collective and ancient of white fears about belonging in Africa. More precisely, the novel plays out these fears in explicit, psychologically dramatised detail.

So, as Marlouw penetrates the country in shadowy images of a river journey (although the land is wrenched by lack of water), he encounters every white fear in the book: dysfunctional infrastructure; bribe-taking, corruption and desperate barter as the only valid currencies; devastated roads; hordes of shadowy masses converging on anything of value; collapse of electricity and water distribution systems; political anarchy; starvation; and near-universal HIV/Aids infection.

Taking off where Coetzee’s Disgrace left off, with the symbolic hand-over of the white farm to its actual black occupants, Trencherman sees a strange reversal. Heleen, Marlouw’s sister who, with him, handed the farm over to its black labourers and left the country for Australia, has a son called Koert.

Unlike the rest of his family, Koert returned to the abandoned South African farm, Ouplaas. Once there, he established a corrupt power-base in the guise of a meat-mogul, cornering the consumer meat market and growing obscenely corpulent himself.

Ramparted off from his minions in a section of the old farm house on Ouplaas, he gathers together an inner circle and runs an autocracy grounded in ‘Bells and meat’. He and his crazed confidantes obsessively play a Nintendo game called Mario Kart.

On a larger scale, Koert dispenses meat and Bells inconsistently and arbitrarily, keeping his growing province of subjects in a state of expectancy and dependence. Their regard for him is a mixture of awe, adoration, mystery and hatred.

Koert is possibly one of the most grotesque and fascinating fictional figures I have yet encountered in a South African work of imaginative writing. He is an abomination, a demi-god, the apogee of inward fear and horror. Physically, he is a malformed, obese and sweating Hulk who spits vengeance, largesse and crazy intelligence by turns. He is the ultimate white anti-whiteman. His repulsiveness knows no bounds.

Koert’s meat-stuffed body is collapsing on him, gangrene spreading from his legs upward. He is self-restricted to his bed in a room in the middle of the old garage cordoned off by ex-farm furniture. This throne-hovel stinks of stale sweat and the contents of the overflowing pottie under his bunk. Somewhere in the folds of his crumpled beddegoed lies a bottle of Bells and a Nintendo game console.

He is everything that every white man fears becoming: a gangrenous despot whose life and language has degenerated into a tinpot mélange of debased dialects, a SA pidgin creole that is as liberating as it is monumentally awful. (Stubbs deserves a few prizes for his rendition of this demotic under-language.)

‘Hast thou heard what Koert tunes you?’ he bellows at Marlow after Marlow eventually gains access to this über-whiteman-devil-king. ‘Not one snot makes sacrifices for me, mine brudder … Mammie’s stopped loading mine credit card. Right? Right! Love is reality, brudder … Do youz realise how many little sheep I graze on dis farm … how many little sheep I myself got for de town and de districts an de global province? Meat fo’ de people. Right? Right! Wij hebben gedansen an celebrated on thiz liddle Platz. Bells ran like syrup. I showed them Mario Kart and we gamed … Peware, I warned de mudfucker. Laughing ends in shit …’

Everything that has been consecrated in the name of whiteness and Afrikanerdom over the course of more than three centuries is finally brought into a kind of glorious, riotous, and lyrical abasement in the figure of Koert. He is the heart of darkness. ‘De horror. I am de horror’ (‘die horrel, die horrel’ in the Afrikaans original), he shouts in the climactic moments of the novel, when his wayward meat-acolytes turn the knife on him and carve him up during an orgiastic, ultimate, apocalyptic farm party, the party to end all parties, the ultimate outcome of the big SA jol, the one that self-destructs cataclysmically and decisively. Finally, a denouement. Finally, the SA story comes to its end. Nothingness. It’s what we always feared, isn’t it?

In Venter’s novelistic intelligence, this self-destruction, this realisation of the fear of internal and moral, as well as external and systemic, downfall, has been lodged in the white SA psyche since time immemorial, in the amygdala (the almond-shaped structure in the brain linked to emotional states) – and it is coupled in the novel to what Venter calls ‘erfvrees’, a kind of fear and loathing so deep that it is carried physically in the body, phylogenetically passed from one generation of white progenitors to the next. Eventually, like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, it eventuates in its own self-fulfilling prophecy, it becomes what it has always feared it will become.

The abomination and destruction in Trencherman is complete. Not only does Koert stack up the family furniture (‘erfgoed’) and sideline it, for good, in the passageways leading to his smoky and demented meat-lair, but the crazed people of his principality of corrupt flesh also succeed in desecrating the graves of his and Marlouw’s immediate family.

In a brilliantly realised scene in the novel, Marlouw (with the gangrenous Koert strapped on his bed to the back of a bakkie) travels to the family graveyard, intent on destroying the family graves himself so the hordes can no longer continue pissing and shitting on the forefathers’ tombstones, as they regularly do, and, once there, the party encounters gravediggers, coffin thieves, in the act of excavating their parents’ and grandparents’ earthly remains. The scene that follows is high drama, breathtaking reading.

This is the beginning of the end of Koert’s shady meat-kindgom. As it is, the sheep are ill, Koert’s bloated body is collapsing and his consorts are dying of Aids.

The party escapes from the massing grave-throngs and Koert announces a celebration, a boisterously self-destructive finale. The mad ‘witch’ who crawls around on all fours in the surrounding hills, crepitating and cursing, Ouma Zuka, comes down to the drunken bonfire celebration and pronounces: ‘He’s the mzungu. He’s not one of us … This mzungu is vermin that’s come to live on your werf, meant for humans only.’

Mzungu – the greatest and final curse upon the white person in Africa – a non-being. Koert’s henchmen take out a long knife and begin to stab him, ritualistically murdering the King of Meat, the apogee of white self-elevation. Koert himself, in his dying moments, exclaims: ‘I am the trencherman, Marlouw. I am he … I have devoured you and your language. I have cut you up into pieces.’

A ‘trencherman’ is one who cadges meals, an eater of meat, but a ‘trencher’ is also a cutting instrument, a person who carves meat.

Asked to comment on the doom-laden preoccupation with meat in his novels (one of them entitled Foxtrot vir die Vleiseters), Venter says: ‘I think in all cultures meat is seen as a privilege. In Foxtrot van die Vleiseters this privilege is specifically connected to the white farming community. A lot of meat becomes an indulgence.

‘Consuming even more becomes decadent and eventually repulsive, Venter continues. ‘Koert is the personification of the fallen Afrikaner that is so feared by Marlouw’s father (the ghost voice in the mountain, in Trencherman). Koert is a meat-devouring abomination, a full-on monster that has also managed to bastardise and destroy the language of Afrikaans. I think this is the guy readers should be worried about, not the black people who’ve screwed up their farm.’

Indeed he is. It is in whiteness, rather than blackness, that the horror, Kurtz’s horror, and Koert’s abomination of all things sacred to white flesh, becomes fully and finally real.

● This is the full version of a review that appeared as ‘Book of the Week’ in the Sunday Times on 24 August 2008, cut down to half its original length in the print version.

eben venter’s website is here