Lost: Part 1

 I'm watching Lost for the fourth time (thanks, Netflix). Apparently so are thousands of other people around the world, making the series a global phenomenon for the second time. 

Warning: the final season and especially the last episode always reduce me to tears -- ugly, uncontrollable, cathartic tears -- and I plan to blog about it. And no, the tears are not because of the shitshow that is the final season. I can't quite explain it, but this show does things to me. So why would I put myself through that -- again? Because the series is that good. 

I've been reading articles that other people have been posting about rewatching the series, like me, and watching the series for the first time -- and, most interesting, watching people watch the series for the first time, including this hilarious one. Something that keeps coming up is that new viewers, unscarred by years of waiting for some sort of solution to the many mysteries of the island, don't hate the last season. In fact, they think it's pretty good. And they can't understand why we think it means what we think it means.

I'm trying so hard not to give spoilers here. If you haven't watched the series, stop here. Your viewing should be unmarred by any expectations.

I, like everyone else, thought that the last season, especially the last episode, meant that everyone had been dead all along. That everything the characters had gone through had been part of some kind of shared purgatory, lowering the stakes (because they could never have been rescued and all the trials they experienced were meaningless set-ups) and rendering its mysteries void.

Apparently, and this is a big apparently, we were wrong. It's one reading, but one that new viewers don't share. Which means that we're all obliged to rewatch the series and see why our cynicism led us to the worst possible conclusion. All hands on deck. Or bamboo. Or whatever.

But I started rewatching the series before I read these articles and the mystery deepened. Why? Some people, most of them uncultured heathens, don't like the series for the reason the rest of us love it: the mysteries. I once read that people formed viewing parties each week, after which they'd discuss their theories about where the island was, what the Dharma initiative was, what the numbers meant, who the others were, what happened to Walt and more. 

I'm a viewing party of one. And so far, I want to know two things: where the polar bears came from and what the smoke monster is.

The series may be the product of several writers' imaginations, but it became something more concrete over the years. It doesn't matter that we don't have any answers (or that we have several hundred instead) -- the island exists out there somewhere now because we willed it into being. The mysteries are the important thing, the soil on which the island is built, and the joy of the series is uncovering clues and piecing them together -- no matter whether or not they actually lead somewhere. It's a Schrodinger's box situation; they're both there and not there at the same time.

In Part 2, I plan to discuss the first thing that intrigued me about the series: the characters and what they represent. But I rarely plan my posts (no sarcasm needed, thanks) (this one was meant to be about how the first season primes us to read the final season as we did, so I guess that'll be forthcoming too), so who knows. See you in the next one.

The Somerton Man

I'm breaking the mold (my mold, which admittedly was already fractured and worn) here by blogging about something that is not literary or related to publishing or my frustrations with publishing or about the discord between the world of my imagination and reality or - you get the point. For those of you already familiar with the Somerton Man, you can probably jump ahead or just skip this post entirely. I have nothing new to add. All this information has ben analysed and debated over and over and over. But if you're still reading, let's go.

First: I love mysteries. You may have realised this when I blogged about Marquez' Chronicle of a Death Foretold. But it has to be the right mystery. My criteria are vague. I'm not much for supernatural theories - magic is just science we haven't figured out yet, so nothing 'mystic'. I enjoy true crime, but not all true crime. I'm interested in crimes affecting women (I can make a sarcastic comment here but I won't), and not interested in crimes involving children. I'm interested in why people break the social contract, but I don't believe in making excuses for deviant behaviour either. (Life's hard, but it's not a character in your story and so it also doesn't owe you anything.) I particularly like frustrating mysteries, where there is a set of clues and the "truth", but the only way to link one to the other is to have been there and witnessed it.

Cue: the mystery of the Somerton Man. I referred to this offhand in a recent (time is relative) post, but let me explain why I'm writing about it now: the mystery was recently solved, except that it wasn't. We now know who he is, but not why he died or - well, you'll see.

On 1 December 1948, on a beach in Somerton Park, Adelaide, Australia, two horse-riders stumbled across a man in a suit. At first, they thought he was doing what people do at a beach (particularly, I would imagine, in a post-world war society): sitting on the sand, watching the waves and contemplating the choices he had made, but as they rode back home, they realised something was wrong. There was no obvious cause of death, and witnesses reported they had seen the man in the same position the previous evening from about 7 p.m.

He was dressed formally: in a shirt and tie, brown trousers and shoes, and a tailored double-breasted jacket, but he was not wearing a hat (remember: it's 1948). He did not have a wallet and there was no other form of identification in any of his pockets. In fact, the labels had all been carefully cut from his clothes. Police immediately suspected suicide, or perhaps a stroke (but that was not quite as racy).

But then the autopsy found his stomach, intestines, kidneys, liver and spleen all to be "deeply congested" while his heart was perfectly normal. The Somerton Man had been poisoned, but there was no trace of any poison in his blood or in any of the affected organs. The only conclusion the coroner could make was that his death was "not natural" and probably "not accidental".

(I'm going to condense time and mix details like this with the findings of the police's investigation because, well, I can. Also, I am going to leave out dead ends, like people incorrectly identifying the body to police, because you can read all that online but not here. The Wikipedia entry is a very detailed account.)

The coroner noted that the man's shoes were clean and had been recently polished, suggesting he had not been wandering the shore and considering the many ironies of existence. The sand around the body was not disturbed and there was no evidence of spit or vomit, which one would expect from a man dying of poison. Later, a witness would claim that he had seen one man carrying another in the vicinity on the night the Somerton Man died.

Found in various places on the man's person were: an unlit cigarette, a box of cigarettes (which contained several cigarettes of a different brand), an unused rail ticket to Henley Beach, a possibly used bus ticket, a comb, chewing gum and a half-empty box of matches.

The police were unable to identify the man using his dental records. Two newspapers ran the story, but all the tips flooded in in response to the publicity led to dead ends. So, the police made a plaster cast of the man's head and shoulders, the coroner embalmed the body and it was buried.

I know what you're thinking. It was my first thought, too. It's 1948 and the man has no identification, not even the labels on his clothes. Obviously, he was a spy, because the movies have taught me that every vaguely suspicious person in the 1940s was a spy. Apparently Adelaide was Spy City because there was a military research facility nearby and Australia's espionage (I mean, intelligence) organisations were going through some "changes", so they had a surplus. We'll make this The Theory to Beat.

The next "break" in the case (check out the lingo) was a piece of paper that was sewn into one of the man's trouser pockets, which was discovered several months after the body came to be just a body. (Note also that there was evidence he had tailored other spots on his own suit, which will be relevant shortly.) It was rolled up and on it was the phrase "Tamám shud", in a "foreign" script. The phrase comes from the final page of a book of poetry titled Rubaiyat of Omar Kayyam, translated from Persian to English in 1849, and it means "it is ended". The poems are all about living life with no regrets and, so, dying without any baggage (excuse the pun). It looked like the paper had literally torn from a copy of the book, rather than copied by hand.

Actual photo of the script, via Wikimedia Commons

That book turned up in the backseat of someone's car, which was parked near the beach and had its windows open because it was a different time. The final phrase had been torn out from the back of the book, so it cannot be coincidence. The car owner gave the book to police once he realised it was relevant to the case, but he said he did not know the dead man. Some reports say that the book appeared in the man's car a full week or two before the Somerton Man died, suggesting he was staying in the area and that he visited the beach at least once before his death.

The book contained two pieces of information. The first was a series of capital letters, written by hand at the back of the book, that were assumed to be a code:

Police scan of the handwritten code, via Wikimedia Commons

However, cryptologists have never been able to break the code and at least one professional organisation asserts that it cannot be a code. So far, this is very spy-like behaviour - except for the fact that this book landed in the police's hands at all - supporting The Theory to Beat. 

The second piece of information was a telephone number, also written at the back of the book. This phone number belonged to Jessica Ellen "Jo" Thompson, who claimed she did not know the dead man. However, police noted that she was being "evasive" (I am curious what exactly this entailed) and that when she was shown the plaster case, she looked like she was "about to faint" (you know, as women do). She then asked that her name and other details be removed from the case files (and the police complied). 

Jo died in 2007 and in 2014, her daughter Kate said she believed her mother did know the man but for some reason refused to acknowledge him. There were also details about her mother that Kate couldn't reconcile, like the fact that Jo spoke Russian but refused to say where or when she had learnt the language and she was interested in communism (which of course means she must have been depraved). The only clue her mother left her daughter with was the offhand comment that the Somerton Man was known "at a higher level than the police force". What are the chances that they were both spies? I've already covered the "surplus" of "agents" both in the area and after the war, so I'd say pretty decent.

The only information Jo would give the police is that she had owned a copy of the Rubaiyat during the war but she had given it to a soldier named Alf Boxall, and so for a while, police believed that Boxall was the Somerton Man. But in 1949, Boxall was found to be alive and in Sydney (with the wonders of social media, I imagine they would have found him sooner). He still had the book and the final page was intact (although technically, that doesn't prove that this book was the same one Jo had given him - apparently, it was not that rare a book).

In January 1949 (roughly two months after the Somerton Man's death), staff at the Adelaide railway station (remember the train ticket) reported that a suitcase had been checked in on the day of his death (30 November) and had not been claimed. The outer label had been removed. Inside were some of the normal things you'd expect to find: pyjamas, slippers, a dressing gown, a pair of trousers (although, interestingly, the cuffs of the trousers contained sand), underwear and shaving items (but no socks). But then there were some unusual things: a screwdriver, a well-worn table knife, a pair of scissors, a square of zinc and a stencilling brush (used on merchant ships).

Also in the suitcase was a spool of orange thread, which matched the thread that had been used to sew the scrap of paper into the Somerton Man's pocket.

A police photo of the discovery of the suitcase, via Wikimedia Commons

The labels on these clothes had been removed too, but the Somerton Man had not been as careful here: some of the clothes had different spellings of the name "Keane" stamped on them and there was a laundry bag with the same name. The clothes could have been second-hand (today we'd say "vintage"), but what are the chances that all of his clothes came from the same source? This was another dead end as the police could not find a missing person with the surname "Keane" or "Kean", not only in Australia, but in other countries too.

As I mentioned, leads continued to trickle in but none of them stuck.

Let's take a massive leap forward now, not only in terms of time but technology. Jo had also had a son, named Robin. In 2013, Robin's widow and his son gave an interview claiming that the Somerton Man was Jo's lover and Robin's father. The proof: the shape of their ears was the same (I kid you not). The police decided to re-open the case and exhume the body to try to extract some DNA evidence. That proved futile, as the body had decomposed too badly, but several strands of hair were found embedded in the plaster cast, which turned out to be viable.

There were a lot of "cooks" in the kitchen by now (most as unqualified as me), but a physicist and electronic engineer named David Abbott and a forensic genealogist named Colleen Fitzpatrick were on the trail with the hairs from the cast. They used the DNA they were able to extract and ran it through a "genealogy research database" (the home page of which claims that "Anyone can upload their DNA profile, analyze the results, and compare DNA shared with others"). They found a distant cousin of the Somerton Man and used that information to construct a family tree of a couple of thousand people (which, still, was the best lead anyone had had in 60-odd years). 

With a bit of sleuthing, Abbott and Fitzpatrick found their man: Carl Webb, an electrical engineer from Victoria, Australia, who had disappeared in 1947. (I do have to point out that this investigation was private and did not take place with police assistance, and that it still needs to be verified by sources other than the media, but I'm going to go with the DNA evidence and the woman whose entire career is dedicated to this kind of thing (i.e. Fitzpatrick) over the organisation that did not find the identity of the Somerton Man in - let me calculate this again - 74 years.)

The information on Webb is pretty scant. He was apparently born in Melbourne in 1905 and then married in 1941. He was "an instrument-maker" and his wife was a "21-year-old foot specialist", according to an interesting article in Smithsonian Magazine. Webb left his wife in 1947 and she started divorce proceedings (in  his absence) in late 1951, being apparently one of the only people who was not aware of the tantalising mystery brewing across the whole second half-century of the 1900s. He liked to read and write poetry, as well as bet on the ponies (those in the know now speculate that the "code" at the back of the book was a shorthand record of the horses he had bet on). Oh, and to nail this coffin shut, his sister was married to a man named ... Thomas Keane.

As I "hinted" at at the beginning of this post, the mystery is solved but not: we have a name and a bare timeline, but not the details of the tapestry, the meat of the pie (inside joke). Was Webb poisoned by someone else, or did he decide that life was just not worth the hassle? If the former, which I am going to tack to The Theory to Beat as the most likely, what was he poisoned with and why did it not show up in his blood or organs? Who was the man who allegedly carried him to the beach and then staged his body? Why was that scrap of paper sewn into his clothing? Why were all the labels removed from his clothes and from his suitcase? What happened in the year and eight months between when he left his wife and shuffled off this mortal coil without a soul noting his demise, at least in public? And what was his relationship with Jo Thompson?

Shakespeare had the innocent Juliet ponder, "What's in a name?" This story suggests not much, particularly if more than half a century has gone by between a man's death (which seems to be the most interesting thing about his life) and the opportunity to erect a headstone. All of which could be proof that he was a spy and doing a better job of hiding it than Jo Thompson. Alternatively, facing down the bleakness of existence in a really bleak decade, perhaps he thought he would do in death what he couldn't do in life: leave a mark, which is kind of like poetry writ large.

I still back The Theory to Beat, for the record. I'm invested in it now, which is proof of nothing. We have the evidence and there is the truth, but we have no way to link those two things together, except using a narrative (and until someone cracks the code of time travel - but then wouldn't we already see proof of someone already having returned to past and solved the mystery?). So I suppose in the end, this ended up being a literary post, in a sense.

A police photo of the Somerton Man's corpse, via Wikimedia Commons

True stories and not-so-true stories

I read Picnic at Hanging Rock when I was about eleven. It was a well-worn paperback from a second-hand bookshop, and I have no idea where it is now (I don't know why this is important but it is). It's the true, legendary story of three Australian schoolgirls and a teacher who, in 1900, go missing during a school field trip - a picnic to Hanging Rock. They (or, to be macabre, their bodies) are never found, nor is there a single trace of them - even in pre-CSI days, you would think they would leave something: a footprint, a piece of linen or thread from their dresses, even hair goddammit.

This mystery has haunted me for years, along with the mystery of what happened to Amelia Earhart and who the Somerton man is (this one has apparently been solved - but has it really? Do I really want it to be?). Later, when I was studying English Lit at varsity, we read Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It drove me Nuts (capital 'N' intended - I'm an editor, so just assume every error is intended. It'll save both of us time). 

Chronicle of a Death Foretold tells the story of the murder of a man named Santiago in a small town in Colombia some time in the 1950s. The foretelling bit isn't an issue - I'm okay with magical realism. The novel suggests that the murderers are a pair of brothers, the Vicario brothers, who are avenging the honour of their sister. (They murder him, his family murders them, their family retaliates, etc.) But there is some doubt. The novel never definitively names the brothers as the murderers and there are other characters who have reason to hate Santiago, which apparently is enough to murder someone.

Sparknotes and similar sites will tell you that the Vicario brothers are, without a doubt, the murderers, but it's not true, so don't write that in your essay. The story is told by an unnamed 'unreliable narrator', who is recalling the events long after they happened. Bits and pieces are missing, and it's possible that the narrator is remembering the whole event incorrectly - or is the murderer themselves. So what we have at the end of the novel is a whodunnit without a 'who'. So just a 'dunnit'. Trust me. I read the thing three times, determined to prove my lecturers wrong and solve the case.

One of my lecturers claimed that one of the themes of the novel is the nature of storytelling itself. What we expect and how violated we feel when our expectations are not met. Well done. Expectations violated. I suspect that if I ever met the author and asked him who the murderer(s) was, he'd say he doesn't know. Sometimes I really hate post-modern literature.

But Chronicle of a Death Foretold is fiction (although it is apparently loosely based on a true story). It doesn't claim any relationship to the truth. (Truth.) Also sometimes crimes like these don't have a resolution. The police have evidence, but no way to piece the evidence together to form the profile of the murderer. Although frustrating, we have to accept this or go mad every single minute of the day.

Imagine my reaction when, this week (i.e. 28 years after first reading the book), I found out that Picnic at Hanging Rock is not a true story. It's a local legend, but there is no evidence that it is true - not a newspaper article or editorial, no police reports, nothing. This mystery has lived in my brain and I have worried about those girls and what might have happened to them. For. Nothing. Why would someone do this? More importantly, why would someone do this to a reader who already has trust issues?

Fargo, both the movie and the series, used the tactic more recently. The writers and directors and producers who take our money argue that an audience will trust the storytellers more if we think the story is true. So they begin the story with the disclaimer, "This is a true story." They then explain where the events took place and when, hammering in the last nail in what turns out to be the coffin of our trust.

None of these storytellers think ahead, apparently. Yes, we trust you in the moment and suspend disbelief so high that it's pretty much a UFO in the sky. But what happens when a person's trust is violated? You feel angry, right? You think back through your interactions with the other person and brand them 'untrustworthy'. You feel violated. I really enjoyed watching both versions of Fargo. But once I learned that they were fiction and not the true stories I had believed them to be, I felt like they had experimented on me and without my consent.

If they had begun their tales with "Based on a true story" or "Based on true stories that happened [where] in [when]", I might have had slackened the rope I'm using to hang them. Alternatively, they could have ended with a similar disclaimer that acknowledged that the story was in fact not true or not entirely true. It's a small difference, but it acknowledges that at least part of the story is fiction. I would have been annoyed when I learnt that there is no truth to the story, but I would not have been so angry. I would have appreciated the (semi-)honesty.

Instead, I am POed. Part of the reason I am so Angry at this ploy is that the storytellers acknowledge the sleight of hand they played with our trust. They said that they could get away with more when they had the audience's trust. Seriously? Are you children who don't understand ethics or the implicit contract between creator and audience or just social mores? There's a scene in The Office where Michael is giving a seminar and he advises the salespeople to lie to their customers. He says, "You bought it. And now you can't return it." The manager of the branch says, simply, "But now we think you're a liar."

Now we think you're liars.

Salem's Lot and Half of a Yellow Sun

Vampires. No radioactive cows. Maybe a ghost and a portal of evil. But mostly vampires. I enjoy a classic vampire story. Let me clarify: I enjoyed Dracula and its queasy Romantic-Gothic sexuality. In a sense, Salem's Lot is a classic vampire movie in that it climbs the same brickwork, but it has dirt on the soles of its shoes and it arrives at the wrong window: that of the servants, who make dull vampires.

The title is promising: Salem's Lot. The witch trials, the drownings, the burnings - and the contemporary knowledge that this is where supposed witches were burnt to death because some fools got syphilis and needed  a scapegoat. We also know that supposed witches are a vengeful bunch who come back to pull out the hair of innocent people. So we begin with that stomach-clenching anticipation. Not only are there no ghosts, there are no witches. No animal familiars, not even an animated broomstick or dancing mice.

I am bored already by this topic. You? Which is My Point (We got here faster than usual. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.) Stephen King is a master of his craft. His plot structure, use of characters, foreshadowing and resolution are precise. Which is, again, My Point. His prose carries you along until you find you are already finished (well, kinda). But the foreshadowing hits you in the face like a hand in a boxer's glove, which is delivered by the characters, who (imaginatively speaking) look like Rocky. In other words (if you are struggling to concentrate, too), the story is predictable. Almost (I can hear you shouting objections already) predictable.

From the 1931 film Dracula

The topic is also promising. Vampires are modelled on Vlad the Impaler, who was a piece of work, easily one of the most evil men of all time. Even a cleaned-up version is sickening: the man literally had people impaled, feet to head, for entertainment. Because he was (let's review this ) evil. More evil than a town of vampires or a squadron of Nazis. A thoroughbred psychopath. Even I would rather believe in supernatural evil, not human evil, so I can begin to understand this level of bad. I crave some moral boundary to shove him behind; I need to know that he and his ilk could be vanquished and sent to suffer for their actions for eternity. Which is perhaps where the vampire legend comes from.

Now you are wishing I had not even written than blurb on Vlad's hobby, right? You are also wishing I would continue. Either way you are still reading. Because holding hands with your horror is your death instinct. You know the drill: that we watch movies like Scream and Saw to confront our own mortality. Because we all subconsciously assume we are immortal (don't argue, you - in a simple, childish argument, even denying it proves it) partly because who could live every day with immediate knowledge that we are dying? When we watch movies like Saw, we spend the first hour or so dancing with the knowledge that we could die any moment, and the second hour calmed because someone perseveres and survives, and that someone is metaphorically us.

(Personally, I don't watch movies like Saw because I can't bear the idea that people would maim each other, nevermind enjoy, nevermind imagine these scenarios. The thought of it literally makes me ill. But zombies... I get that.)

Now here is where the promise of the title is really mangled. (I am trying to restrain myself from making glittery jokes, because they're so easy, but feel free to make your own and not tell me about it.)  Salem's Lot was written in the '80s, roundabout Lost Boys and then Blade. Its vampires are the lost-soul and replaced-by-pure-thirsty-evil sort. They need to be staked, not understood. For all other similarities with Dracula, this lot of vampires lacks the lust of its father figure, which makes this version vapid. Isn't that the point of the vampire legend? Repressed female sexuality? (Read Dracula and get back to me.)

I followed this up with Chimanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, as I promised. It is set during the Nigerian civil war of the 1960s - far more frightening than Dracula but on par with Vlad. For me, it echoes the traumas of the more recent Rwandan crisis, which has always disturbed me. As it should, but perhaps more than it should. My conscience cannot understand - not even if you convinced me that half of the population fell ill with the vampiric illness. Please try. I would much rather believe in supernatural evil, than that there is more than a one per cent chance my neighbours could be convinced that I deserve to die, because someone calls me a cokroach or by virtue of some incidental thing like my dialect or accent or clothing, .

Toni Morrison (I am really cramming everything in to this post) wrote that trauma cannot be transcribed; it is a great bawling absence - see, I am already running short of words. This is how she writes (or doesn't write) about trauma in her novels: by writing 'around' it. EM Forster did the same thing in Passage to India, when the main character suffers a nervous breakdown. Adichie (who is influenced by Morrison's work - she's like the Dickens of modern literature) gives trauma her own spin. She describes elements of the trauma matter-of-factly.

(I am about to get kind of juvenile Vlad here, so read on at your own peril.)

One character is evacuated via a train cart like a cow to slaughter. Next to (leaning on) her is a woman with her daughter's head in a pot - we can only assume it was soldiers with knives not bombs. Adichie describes how ashen the girl's skin in, as if it were dabbed in powder. Adiche refers back to this moment often but never with any overt judgement.

The same character finds her way home to her husband and child, but suddenly cannot walk. Her legs just fail as if a nerve has been severed. She has to be carried everywhere, instead. Again, Adiche presents this to us matter-of-factly, as she might a dinner conversation or visit to the market. Trauma isn't contained in time - it spreads out laterally into innocuous events like shopping for food. It can't be confined to memory, temporal space, even emotion. It is processed in some parts of the brain but not others.

There is also a slight thrill to reading a story with macabre mystery. Our death instinct gleefully steps up again. You are alive and dying, it says. As if death has a quota, you have seen death and been spared. You are human; you are special; you will live for ever.

© Semiotic apocalypse, via http://semioticapocalypse.tumblr.com/: Biafran soldier during Nigerian civil war circa 1967

Kill Yourself and Count to 10

The South African Defence Force: “Inventing threats to the country and scared of its shadow since the 1950s.” People who speak about the actions of this literal force tend to be threatened (no jokes - I knew someone who received death threats for even considering writing about a NP government-planned assassination) or ugly-eyeballed or murdered, which gives us insight into the paranoia that transcends the ping-pong stupidity of US relations with North Korea. But somehow I think I am less of a threat than the urgency of their psychiatric evaluations, and in any case, I will whisper.

See, the Nationalist government was afraid of more than colour TV, rock music and the second half of the century. It was afraid of *hushed tones* the liberals. History tells us that the greatest threat to a regime is that exact same threat carried out by someone else. In this case, one half of a race divided by language and violence dating back to the 19th century, gained power by voicing its second-citizen-man-ship and retained power by intimidation. Yes, they were afraid of the oppressed because they had felt oppressed so they oppressed. I can appreciate that someone heavily invested in their culture might believe that nurturing culture means some degree of separation. But in hindsight, it is about as practical as democracy or communism. You get that now, right?

But this is heavy-duty psychology here.

Up until the 80s, the SADF enforced conscription. Yes, folks. I always think, what we need is more soldiers. Eighteen-year-old men were decked in khakis, oppressed and repressed, and then given rifles. Why? Because we were fighting a war, fool! Against their ghosts and, oh yes, anyone whose hair didn't pass the pencil test. Another book called An Unpopular War (actually a very popular book) raises the issue of the silence around conscription and our fathers’ roles in the force, but primarily what those young men went through that was so heinous they pretend it never happened.

No one talks about it. I have never had a discussion with anyone about this, unless you count my father telling me that he was exempt because he had a heart condition. Some of the forces were sent into Namibia and Angola, destroying people and villages with, um, inventive (I edited my thesaurus so that 'inventive' means 'horrifying') tactics (not as efficiently as Boko Haram though - 16 villages destroyed in one weekend. 16, two days). Some were sent into townships and villages to stir up trouble that they could blame on the 'insurrectionists' (again, I edited my thesaurus so that it means 'an adult who daydreamed about walking down any street in any area without being asked for his papers as if there were a border post on every corner').

No one talks about conscription. No one.

Well almost no one, otherwise there wouldn't be a post. Kill Yourself and Count to 10 by Gordon Torr is about a specific hernia in a long medical report about the SADF. Scene: Greefwald, a small barracks near the border with Botswana and along the Limpopo River. Premise: handfuls of transgressive liberals, gay men and the mentally ill are shipped here and moulded into wholesome members of society. Near-fatal physical tasks like lifting rubble and boulders from one place to another all day, and leisurely jogs in the bright sun or through thick bush, with some mind games before lunch, being a reasonable way to mould a wayward child, right?

Characters: one haunting egomaniac and possible rapist of a psychiatrist; many enraged, impotent and not well-spoken commanders, sergeants and lieutenants; a riff-raff of erratically lovable misfits ranging from those so liberal they can only be pushed to say that they don’t know any black people so they can’t comment on their moral characters, metrosexuals and repressed homosexuals, and drug addicts, psychotics and potential psychotics. In 2015, this counts as a substantial demographic of the South African population, so they stuffed this one up.

The story is told from the present, by a Greefwald survivor, to a third person who is our narrator. The survivor, Lloyd, wants to drum up support for a lawsuit against Levin, the psychiatrist, who is being expedited from Canada. Levin masterminded the camp based on outdated research and with funding from a government spooked by long-legged spiders. The camp is a bit like the retreat in which Sandra Bullock lifts a horse's hock to prove she is better, except the aim is to break you not free you so I shudder to think about the poor horse. A former Greefwald doctor pops up to add perspective on Lloyd’s character.

I hope I have this right. The story is dense and mostly innuendo, so I gave up trying to understand the chronology or characters about midway. (I convinced myself I was living in the moment. In a book about the past.) It is divided into chapters headed by names of people and places. Sometimes the chapters are one page long and cuddle some heavy plot-point that is never alluded to again (or that I could follow - always blame the author, you - have I taught you nothing?). I couldn't match places to people’s names to characters to contexts, so I mostly drifted along, picking up flotsam and fashioning it into a cabin.

What makes my cabin pretty pathetic is that it is made of an incredible story told by an expert writer. His images and constructs are slick, and his sentences and paragraphs well-crafted. (Don’t get a big head, now.) I imagine someone wandering in, saying the book is too long and whittling away at it, so well that they have translated it into a dialect of very concise, very urgent English that turns this book into flotsam on a sea that I pick up and fashion into a cabin (I almost wrote ‘sandwich’) because I can't tell that the pieces are part of a puzzle that is actually a map to land.

All this flotsam bobs around the conclusion. Often, I feel like the writer has spent so long on the rest of the book that the conclusion is, well, far gone. (Maybe I am projecting.) Too far gone. They are so sick of the tripe they have expelled that they wrap everything up with the first piece of rope they are given. Now, this writer ties knots so good they cannot be unpicked and the rest of the book is bound separately by string not rope and the parcels are accidentally sent to different continents. 

Two major ideas play out in the last thirty pages. I want to reset my reading to find the links to the ideas that are right up my street (don't worry, I don't need a pass), but that’s like scouring the Arctic Ocean without a wetsuit. The first idea is psychological and gives insight into the divide between what was planned and what did happen, and so, so much more. The second idea is so extraordinary that it mows the prime neuroses of the SADF and its decision-makers with lime into the flora of the Lowveld. I wish I could just tell you what these ideas are, but spoilers are on the ‘don’t’ side of the bibliophile code of conduct - teasing you with them, however, is in the ‘you may’ column. Perhaps we could play Jacky Hangman? (That in itself is a double clue.)

Word 1: l_ _ _. 

Word 2: _ s _ _ _ _ n _ _ _.

There is a third idea I can talk about. The narrator mentions that the camp was on the site of Mapungubwe, a thousand-year-old Shona kingdom along the Limpopo. The apartheid government was by the 70s so invested in its delusion that it needed to invest in maintaining its delusion. Here was evidence that the land had already been ‘claimed’ - yikes, let me get you a crane to lift those reparations - and that African people had a history of civilisation that the NP government had said didn't exist as they broke champagne bottles and heads against the borders of the so-called homelands - we'll have to make multiple trips with that crane.

Traitors to their archaeological profession (under the 'don't' of their code is 'knowingly fudge history'. I am pretty sure about this) uncovered thousands of artifacts, then locked them in a room at Wits University and literally threw away the key (someone found it, fyi – the room, not the key). I am taking bets that they also played target practice with or made ashtrays out of some pieces. With decades of practice in self-protection (my thesaurus reads 'delusion'), the NPers did a good job of burying history. Today, I know as much about Mapungubwe as I do about those decades of conscription – although unfortunately, I know more than I want to about the types of atrocities the SADF's victims suffered and how the government justified them via the TRC, which is a whole other can of worms.

One last clue about the clues in this can. I know intelligent people who believe the Kingdom of Mapungubwe is a myth drummed up by well-meaning liberals, based on tenuous evidence collected by easily manipulated academics. Counter-counter-history *knowing look*. Which would perhaps be more effective if the liberals publicised their discoveries instead of building casinos and BnBs on the bones. But then again, Jewish elders made and buried fake dinosaur bones… in… everywhere, and  invented carbon dating and convinced everyone it had something to do with time - and Greefwald was a constructive attempt to rehabilitate deviants. Where 'constructive' means that the deviants lug rocks (artifacts?) around like Sisyphus and his eagle.

*sarcasm hand*

Harvest

How did I find this book? Did I download it or did I copy it from somewhere (I'll explain this criminal activity later)? Was it in my Amazon-generated list of recommendations? This is how it feels to read Harvest by Jim Crace. It feels a bit like reading Oryx and Crake (or have you forgotten this quickly?!). It lingers, like overpowering aftershave that wafts into a thin note of something cool and shadowy. Obviously shadowy does not mean happy tralala handstand here, because you know how I feel about happy. Suspicious.

I also don't know why I didn't blog about it when I finished it. I read it a few months ago, in that bleak period when I was too tired even to read. Yet I read Harvest. I couldn't not read Harvest.

Am I the only one whose relationships with books sometimes don't have words? Or is it just the nature of tapping away at a keyword (the 'j' button of which is stuck, I think with something sugary) without human contact? I mean, if it's just me, I don't have to use words, do I? And if I do, well, that's a new problem that requires me leaving my apartment.

Apart from Oryx and Crake, it also characterised my reading of People's Act of Love and Mara and Dann. Which if you read back (although I don't think I used labels back them so you'll just have to stumble blindly through 400 and something posts. Good luck), gutted me. Not only because I missed the characters and narrative style, but because my friends had just kicked me out of their snowy or verdant or dusty lives and I must have hit my head because when I woke up I was here. But here doesn't fit like there did.

Make sense? No, I didn't think so. I'm not sure I understood that. But then I did hit my head so I have an excuse.

Most of Harvest is almost unbearably creepy. It reminded me of The Village, except after a little while, you don't have time to worry about the Others - one eye is watching your neighbours in case they set fire to your house and the other is watching the gentlemen of the farm because people are going missing (well, not missing, you know where some of them are: inside the house), your brain is thinking about this idyllic but harsh life on the farm and in the village (where your neighbours are so welcoming) and your heart is bleeding for the trespassers who are now undergoing a punishment that seems like a hanging except you live and people throw squishy tomatoes at you.

Sorry, is that a bit much in one gulp? Well, that's the point, although I'm sure you realised that. Right?

Okay, now, spoilers exiled. Within the first few pages, you meet the narrator, a villager on a late 19th century farm, as he tries to convince us the villagers live autonomously. Feudal system aside, he was not born in the village, but married into it. (No one seems worried about interbreeding and the rather stupid children they seem to be producing.) So his neighbours are wary of him. Who knows what he could do?! Set fire to his own house?

Rather than being wary of him right now, they become wary of a camp of trespassers. Apparently setting a fire in that part of never never land means you are settling there, like a smoke signal (har!). The villagers and gentleman of the farm traipse towards the smoking fire to dissuade its lighters. No one appears to be home so they destroy everything like children unmaking a fort into a mess their mother has to tidy up. But no, there is a beautiful woman. Now the men stand around and gulp.

Then, like the trespassing rats they are, two men step in to help her. Her family, we can assume. One threatens the gentleman on his horse, the woman spits at him and the men are captured but the woman runs away. Some of the men go after her and you know enough to rock on your heels thinking she best run and hide like a deer. One that survives.

There is another gentleman on the farm, not propertied but an artist slash surveyor. Although he may just be an artist wishing he were surveyor because he needs the money. He goes after her too, but instead of feeling relief, you hope he runs and hides like a blerry rabbit.

Some feeling you can't name because it's hiding in the shadows is now tumbling around and making you dizzy. You don't like this situation, which is solved by everyone leaving the forest. Trespassers (minus one) in tow. No wait! There is a gallows-type structure set in some ruins of something, someone pulls out two nooses (neese?), they point the men's heads through until their chins are resting on the ropes and they are forced to stand on tiptoes. Then the villagers walk away. They intend to come back later and throw things at the men but then there is a violent storm and they snuggle up next to fires.

The narrator, not being a real villager, does come out to help them - and there I have to stop recounting that plot line because I almost spoiled it. I can tell you the woman is narry to be found, which is either a good or a bad thing. Obviously. But you don't know which to hope for. The artist is also missing. And all the men are missing the woman and all the women are furrowing their brows.

Plot line B involves the gentleman of the farm's deceased wife having relatives who suddenly decide to become farmers. The farm is technically theirs, but they are complete jerks who act like bouncers at a club where the club is anything that touches the same earth as them. They have now arrived to assess the property, because they would like to evict the villagers and turn the land to grazing. Basically replacing the villagers with cows. Bad joke. It's a metaphor for industrialisation and the disregard for the wellbeing of other humans - well, not a metaphor, it's an example.

The narrator has some suspicions about these men, but it doesn't really matter because the villagers can see the writing on the wall and they are hightailing it anywhere else but there. Well, obviously not anywhere else, but somewhere within a couple of hundred kilometres where they can make a living without being beaten by these specific men.

To recap, my dear readers, we are in the village from The Village, but the red people are hiding in the hearts of the villagers and the nooses and the entire bodies of the men who repossess the farm. Some more red things are hiding in the spaces left by the woman and the artist, who allegedly has led the exodus from the farm, but without taking his stuff.

On the bright side, you learn a lot about subsistence farming. Because the narrator is relatively new to the area (having parents who aren't cousins), he relates the learning curve of trying to fit in among these people who don't trust him (because his parents weren't cousins).

Jokes aside, this part of the story balances (and maybe draws) out the unsettled feelings that do handstands in the corner of your vision. The way the narrator describes the world around him helps you to understand why he lives among these people. There is also his sense of loyalty - he grew up with the gentleman and has never left his side. He is honest about his guilt and failure to stand up for the trespassers, his concern, and his sense of self-preservation - and his lust and jealousy.

Harvest is more than a horror story. It is more than an example: it is a metaphor for the changing times, from the pastoral to the industrial, the sense that no one explains what is going one, but someone keeps switching the signposts around. And just removes some of them. As a result, you too are wary, looking into every shadow of the story, hoping to see the young woman or a matchstick you can use to halt the wrecking ball on the horizon.

Some of the mysteries have answers and others don't - not in the way detective series have led us to understand 'answer'. I suppose even the alleged answers are mysterious. I'll bet that you feel a little unsettled and a little curious based on only a few paragraphs that are mostly facetious jokes, right? What did it for me are the tortures inflicted on those men for silly infringements. You're a vagrant, just like these people are about to become, and these people attack your shelter and wife. What are you, especially as a man in that time, going to do? Threaten their stick-thin and therefore breakable fibula is what.

These jokes are a way of dealing with what I don't understand, which is almost everything in this novel. The extent to which I am trying to deal with it is a verification of how little can be understood (which is tautological, but this seems fitting). Harvest is a beautifully told novel in which the narrator and his voice fit as perfectly as a novelist can write them. You know as much as he does - what he knows is what he has learnt and what he feels he needs to explain, and what he doesn't he still feels he needs to uncover. (And here we are at the beginning again.)