Entertainment

Intrusive narrator ensures Kalahari family drama becomes a sandy waste of time

November 22, 2009 Edition 1

Karina Magdalena Szczurek

At the end of the 19th century, during his many sea voyages, Alf Johannsen comes to southern Africa and decides to make the Kalahari his permanent home. On his way to settle in the desert, he meets Deirdre, a teacher from England. The two marry in Cape Town, and Alf persuades his young wife to give the dry and dusty landscape of the Kalahari a try.

In spite of being warned that "he was not only misinformed but deluded to believe he could survive in the Kalahari, let alone farm sheep or anything else", Alf persists. With the help of a few indigenous inhabitants, against all odds, the couple succeed in making the desert their home. At least for a while. Rosemund J Handler's Tsamma Season is their story as told by Emma, their eldest child.

The novel concentrates on the first 14 years of Emma's life. Like her father, Emma becomes enthralled with the Kalahari. Her narration meticulously chronicles the rhythms and cycles of desert life and her family's attempts to cope with the harsh surroundings.

Even though their farm is far from any other place inhabited by settlers, their lives do not remain unaffected by the social and political developments in the country.

Colonial attitudes of superiority dictate the lives of people of colour and Europeans alike. The tensions between Afrikaners and the English are also palpable, and eventually escalate into the Boer War.

Tsamma Season captures many of these historical forces at work in the microcosm of the Johannsen farm, but focuses on the private lives of its few inhabitants as they strive to make a living in the desert.

In the end, they are defeated in their efforts - not by the hostile environment or the country's political developments, but by their inability to cope with their private demons. The birth of Emma's younger brother drives a wedge into her parents' marriage, which has dire consequences for the family.

Mistakenly, Emma's mother believes the Kalahari is somehow responsible for the changes: "I hoped, foolishly, to bend it to my will in certain ways. Instead of which it has brought me to submission while excluding me absolutely. More than that: it has changed me beyond recognition... No city could have taught me half as well the insignificance of our place in the universe." She worries for Emma, that she will also be "taken" by the desert, but the choices she makes for her daughter deprive her of much more than her father and her home.

Tsamma Season is Handler's third novel (after Madlands and Katy's Kid). For the most part it is an interesting meditation on the Kalahari, without doubt the central character of the novel, but there is a certain inconclusiveness in its portrayal which leaves us wondering which of its versions the narrator wanted us to understand: the romanticised, the unrelenting, the mystical?

All, or maybe none of the above?

Many of the human stories which play out in its landscape failed to grip me, mostly because of their fragmentary nature. Many characters make cameo appearances in the Johannsens' lives, but Emma fails to integrate them adequately into her family's overall story. At times it seems as if these characters are introduced only to drag the worst of humanity to the surface. To me, some of the explicit portrayals of violence seemed gratuitous, verging on exploitative.

Even her parents' and her own trajectory does not always seem plausible in the context Emma provides. The conflict which arises between her parents is not sufficiently motivated. Obviously, as a child, she is unable to understand many of their choices, but we as readers should be allowed to do so nevertheless. Her own love story is not given enough space and is treated superficially, culminating in a soapy, odd sex scene which involves a mosquito.

Purely technically, Emma is a self-conscious and intrusive narrator, never allowing the reader to settle into her story.

To start with, most of the chapter titles unnecessarily give away their content. In the beginning, the time shifts between different parts of the narrative create confusion and the ending does not provide any particular revelation about the events they describe either.

Reaching the end of Tsamma Season was a relief for this particular reader.