[BobbyB]

Like a cattle prod to the grey cells
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 29/12/2007



Helen Brown reviews The Way of the Women by Marlene van Niekirk

Call it laziness or a short attention span, but I prefer short novels to doorstoppers. Wading through pages of description and character analysis frustrates me, but I still want to know how things turn out, so I plough on to the end where frustration turns to exhaustion.


Milla has enough wisdom to fear what is coming
Saturated by detail, I find myself unable to savour the pleasures of post-novel speculation: why did she really marry him? Was it all her mother's fault? Would I have made the same mistakes under similar circumstances?

The marvellous Marlene van Niekerk has proved the latest exception to my rule.

At 640 pages, The Way of the Women is too heavy to read in the bath, and the plot - a white woman with motor neurone disease, nursed by her black servant, looks back on her life running a farm in apartheid South Africa - doesn't sound the sort to make those 640 pages whistle past; but van Niekerk's prose is like a cattle prod to the weary grey cells.

Her paralysed narrator, Milla, is a feisty, conflicted, unreliable and observant narrator. Her nurse, Agaat, is more than her match but, like Milla, we cannot know what Agaat is thinking as she ministers with thorough, apparently devoted attention (she often avoids eye contact) to the speechless and immobile patient.

This recalls Stephen King's Misery but with greater literary sophistication and character complexity, and more cultural comment. The torture is more intense for not being physical, and because reader and victim cannot be sure what is kindly meant and what is (arguably just) punishment.

"I know how Agaat's mind operates," says Milla.

"She has no respect for a helpless human being. Possibly still pity. But not for long, then she wants to see signs of independence. She knows she'll have to generate it in me if she wants to see it, reaction, resistance. Because only when she's brought me to that will she have something to subjugate."

As Milla lies there, washed, fed and entertained by only Agaat, she remembers her life in dreamlike italicised passages, and through the decades of diary entries that Agaat reads out for her.

Milla comes from a long line of strong farming women for whom men have provided little more than an arbitrary power to kick against. Her beloved farm was founded by her great-grandmother. Her own mother is a demanding matriarch.

The young, aspirant Milla hopes for something better when she meets handsome Jak, and she is intoxicated by his sexual power; but she is shocked from her romantic dreams when his intellectual weakness finds its outlet in violence.

She tries to hide her disastrous marriage from the neighbours by running the farm, slaughtering the livestock and singing in church, while she loses herself in brandy and romantic German Lieder.

Milla sees herself as a good, even socially advanced, Afrikaaner when she adopts Agaat and attempts to "tame" the crippled child her husband demeans as a "woolly". Yet she has enough wisdom to fear what is coming: "Sometimes I feel as if the child is a dark little storage cubicle into which I stuff everything that occurs to me," runs a diary entry from the 1950s.

This is a tense, compulsive novel. Though it's tempting to skip some of the poetic, dreamy passages, they enrich the psychological drama.

Despite its length, I will be wondering about it for months. Why did Milla marry him? Why didn't she leave? Why does Agaat stay? How could there be truth and reconciliation between the two?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main...9/bonie129.xml