Fathers and Fugitives
“a post-existentialist novel about the futility of making choices but the greater sadness of living passively. Its bleakness is relieved by Naude’s richly metaphoric style, elegantly translated . . .”
Late in Afrikaans writer S.J. Naude’s touching, disturbing novel, the protagonist, Daniel, now an enfeebled old man, is standing near a group of humble graves on abandoned farmland. He thinks: “Around him, everybody fades and falls away. But he persists.” Throughout the novel, Daniel is a witness to a series of deaths which seem to have little emotional effect on him.
When we meet Daniel, he is a sometime journalist and fiction writer living in London. Daniel is gay but seems to have no friends or lovers beyond an occasional one-night stand. At an exhibition at the Tate Modern, Daniel encounters two Serbians, Oliver and Yugo, beginning an odd menage á trois that will lead Daniel from London to Germany to a shabby flat in Belgrade. Daniel rather passively allows these men into his home and follows them to theirs, paying all the expenses along the way. Daniel’s hope was that these men would “bring some colour into his days and shock his fiction into a new direction. That ultimately he would be able to move them around like pawns.” Daniel doesn’t grieve over Oliver and Yugo’s tragic end, but it does seem temporarily to cure his writer’s block.
Shortly after, Daniel moves back to South Africa to care for his dying father. When his father dies, Daniel leaves the corpse in the bedroom and goes kayaking in the harbor, barely avoiding being killed by the parade of large tanker ships.
Daniel’s father’s will leaves him a sizeable amount of money with the stipulation that he will go out into the country and spend a month with Theon, a cousin he hasn’t seen since childhood. Daniel finds Theon on a failing farm. After his wife left, Theon has allowed his laborers and their family to live in his house with him. Theon prevails upon Daniel to take the laborers’ cancer-stricken child to Japan for a new experimental cure. While Theon is at the Tokyo hospital with the child, Daniel plans to work on a new essay, “Architecture and Death.” The cure doesn’t work, the child dies, and Daniel and Theon part ways.
After cutting all ties during a brief sojourn in a cottage in the Kent countryside, Daniel accepts Theon’s invitation to come live with him in South Africa. Both men need each other to stave off loneliness. Years later, Daniel and Theon petition to adopt a baby whose mother, the sister of the boy who died in Japan, died in childbirth. This penultimate episode is seen through the eyes of Hein, a young, mentally unstable drifter who has been living in the storage room of Daniel and Theon’s cabin. Hein’s attempt to “rescue,” as he sees it, the baby leads to two more deaths.
At the end, an old man, Daniel has come back from England to the gravesite on the abandoned farm. Daniel is the lone survivor. When he falls, alone in an empty field, he passively accepts his own death as he has passively accepted so much of his life: “So, like this, he will keep drifting in the translucent sea. Without pain or desire. Until he too becomes water.”
The challenge of Naude’s novel is to make us care about a passive character. Though the novel is written in the third person, we see the other characters through Daniel’s eyes and their stories grab our interest. The outcasts Daniel comes to know try to take control of their lives and, sometimes, even their deaths. Daniel tends to go along with their choices. Fathers and Fugitives is a post-existentialist novel about the futility of making choices but the greater sadness of living passively. Its bleakness is relieved by Naude’s richly metaphoric style, elegantly translated from the Afrikaans by Michael Heyns. This is a sad, but gorgeously written book.