Homeward bound

Fathers and Fugitives is a strange and beautiful book that unfolds unexpectedly. It is a gloomy book, too, suffused with a quality the writer Jan Morris once saw in S. J. Naudé’s fellow South African novelist Damon Galgut: a “sort of threadbare despair … a kind of nihilism” (see her review of In A Strange Room in the Guardian, May 22, 2010). Central to this nihilism is a strong undercurrent of passivity. Life feels like something that is done to you, as the central character’s journey unfolds over a series of fragmented episodes, often set years apart, without obvious connection or coherence, marked by abrupt endings.

Naudé’s novel tells the story of Daniel, a gay South African writer and journalist. We first meet him living in London. It is winter, “blue and bleak”, and when he comes across two Serbian men at an art gallery, he invites them back to his flat. It is clear at once that they are from a different world to his. He offers them wine. They buy cheap beer, “the kind that soccer hooligans drink litres of before beating the shit out of each other”. He has sex with one of them. Before long (and against the advice of another Serbian friend), they have both moved into his flat.

One day Daniel comes home and they are gone. Months later they write, and he is persuaded to meet them in Germany, where they go on a surreal, Pinteresque camping trip. Their tent is stolen, along with their belongings. The two men then persuade Daniel to accompany them to Belgrade (all the while he is paying their bills). Their flat is grim, the neighbourhood “a shithole”. The penny finally drops. “How has he ended up here, and what on god’s earth is keeping him here? Unexpectedly, he feels a yearning for Cape Town. For South Africa.” Days later he finds both men dead, hanging from the ceiling of their flat.

Naudé, who writes in Afrikaans, doesn’t just share a sensibility with Galgut; he has been championed by the Booker-winning author for some time. In Galgut’s preface to Naudé’s collection of short stories, The Alphabet of Birds (2015), he tells us that Naudé’s “South Africa is not an historical place so much as a condition to be escaped from”. We also learn how, “typically, at the heart of these stories, a man or a woman has left South Africa but, after years of absence, is drawn back by something personal”. In Fathers and Fugitives this principle is maintained, and here the impetus to return is Daniel’s father, who is dying from an advanced neurological condition. Daniel, without the bourgeois ties of his successful, conventional sister, “her teeth whiter than clouds”, is the natural person to look after him.

At this point in the novel Daniel is still committed to his own footloose existence, and as he gazes from his apartment window over the glittering lights of Cape Town, he judges that “his life – so delicately balanced between two countries – makes it possible to approach South Africa as a stranger … No, as somebody from another planet. That’s the way the Brits like it: to observe everything as if from a spaceship”. But he is wrong. And the pivot here is a will, an inheritance conditional on a strange commitment that will propel him back to his family’s roots in the Free State.

A remarkable amount happens in the final third of this short book, and in some ways the action flows from the more conventional tropes of the modern South African novel: we find a property with a complex ownership history; a difficult set of relationships between white and Black South Africans. The country turns out to be both historical and an inescapable condition. The ending, jagged and restless, resists easy categorization, but it is impossible not to be moved by the way the rootless Daniel is drawn incrementally back into the world of his family, his origins, by the eternal pull of home.

Daniel Clarke is Factual Commissioning Editor at BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds

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