annethology
  • Home
    • About me >
      • A little more about me
    • About my books
    • Author talks
    • Contact me
    • Forthcoming events
    • Privacy
    • Sign up for my newsletter
  • Annecdotal
  • Articles
    • Print journalism
    • Where psychology meets fiction
  • Sugar and Snails
    • Acknowledgements
    • Blog tour, Q&A's and feature articles >
      • Birthday blog tour
    • Early endorsements
    • Events >
      • Launch photos
      • Launch party videos
    • in pictures
    • Media
    • If you've read the book
    • Playlist
    • Polari
    • Reading group questions
    • Reviews
    • In the media
  • Underneath
    • Endorsements and reviews
    • Launch party and events
    • Musical accompaniment
    • Pictures
    • Questions for book groups
    • The stories underneath the novel
  • Short stories
    • Becoming Someone (anthology) >
      • Becoming Someone (video readings)
      • Becoming Someone reviews
    • Print and downloads
    • Read it online
    • Quick reads
    • Virtual annethologies
  • Reading and reviews
    • Themed quotes
    • Reviews A to H
    • Reviews I to M
    • Reviews N to Z
    • Fictional therapists
    • Nonfiction
    • Debut novelists >
      • 2013 >
        • Shelley Harris
        • Claire King
        • Harriet Lane
        • Alison Moore
        • Anthea Nicholson
        • Susie Nott-Bower
        • Charlotte Rogan
        • Gavin Weston
      • 2014 >
        • Carys Bray
        • Emma Chapman
        • Emma Healey
        • Johanna Lane
        • Mary Costello
        • Audrey Magee
        • Kathryn Simmonds
        • Aria Beth Sloss
      • 2015 >
        • Sarah Armstrong
        • Claire Fuller
        • Peyton Marshall
        • Gavin McCrea
        • Lisa McInerney
        • Jamie Mollart
        • Anna Smaill
        • Fleur Smithwick
        • Philip Teir
    • Reading around the world

Africa’s Dance of Death: Jimfish by Christopher Hope

3/5/2015

8 Comments

 
Picture
A strange young man emerges from the ocean in 1980s South Africa. Neither black nor white but a bit of both, with the blue tinge of the coelacanth thrown in, Jimfish is a problem for a country in which people are “coralled in a separate ethnic enclosures, colour-coded for ease of identification and tightly controlled” (p1). Nevertheless, he finds employment as a gardener under the tutelage of Soviet Malala until he’s caught “as tightly tangled as the tendrils of the strangler fig” (p7) with the police sergeant’s daughter, Lunamiel, and has to flee the country. His attempts to stay on “the right side of history” take him on an epic journey through Africa into Eastern Europe and back again. Everywhere he goes he encounters carnage and confusion (p123):

The more he saw of the world, the less he understood. Worse still, what he did understand was so crazy, so cruel, that none of the lessons of his old teacher Soviet Malala seemed to apply; not rage nor the many sides of history, neither the lumpenproletariat, nor the settler entity.

Jimfish’s odyssey encompasses poverty tourism, weapon porn, child soldiers, albino auctions, ineffective peacekeepers, blood diamonds, the original concentration camps, AIDS, the Rwandan genocide and civil war stretching from Yugoslavia to Sierra Leone. Jimfish is looking for the rage that his mentor, soaked in the teachings of Karl Marx, has promised will fuel the powerless to throw off their oppressors. Except that the powerless are too busy surviving to fight back.

While the main character’s rage proves elusive, the rage of the author is writ large. It’s not only communist ideology that bears the brunt of his anger, but capitalism – particularly in its American form – and basic greed. Underneath it all, I detect the sadness that – even with the saintly Nelson Mandela elected president – apartheid hasn’t died, but merely mutated. It’s a disturbing message, and one I can’t disagree with, but I felt bludgeoned by this (thankfully short) novel, accurately described on the dust jacket as “part fable, part fierce commentary on the politics of power”.

I’m drawn to dark topics but Jimfish took me to the limits of what I can endure. Unlike other uncomfortable reads, such as John Boyne’s A History of Loneliness and Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Christopher Hope offers the reader few handrails along the way. As with Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, there’s a love story of sorts, but the characters are mere ciphers for the message of doom. The prose is utilitarian and the plot contrived; intentionally so, I’m sure, for this is satire and its purpose is not to entertain. Although I found some humour in the live televising of the “Marines ambushed by the media in Mogadishu” (p145) and the Comoros Islanders welcoming an invasion as their sole claim to fame (p157), as with Real Monsters, I found it too heavy-handed and too tragic to merit much more than a smile.

This is an important novel, and I do feel somewhat guilty that I want to look away. Published in the UK on 7 May, I’ll be interested to see what other reviewers make of it – perhaps, as I sometimes find, a Guardian review will show me what I’ve missed – my thanks, meanwhile to Atlantic books for my review copy.

I first encountered Christopher Hope as part of the generation of politically active white South Africans writing about the evils of apartheid within their country. In an ideal world I’d have been hearing from more of the Black voices, but it was his 1981 debut novel, A Separate Development, along with Hilda Bernstein’s chilling Death Is Part of the Process in 1983 that helped bring the horrors of the regime to the forefront of my mind. So Jimfish makes a good tie-in to the latest flash fiction challenge from Charli Mills to write a 99-word story that tackles racism. It’s a topic that has featured in my reviews in recent months, particularly with Lindsay Hawden’s novel about the Gypsy Holocaust and Celeste Ng’s debut about a tragedy within a Chinese-American family. In a cruel twist on the South African story, racism and xenophobia is also a factor in the post-apartheid nation, as borne out in (one of my rare non-fiction reviews) A Man of Good Hope.

Charli’s posts take her followers on an exquisite journey from some aspect of her personal experience to the often unpredictable prompt. This time she began with the excitement of experiencing a minor earthquake giving way to the devastating news from Nepal. I was reminded of the novel about the 2010 Haiti earthquake which spurred my disorientation flash and decided to stay in that territory for my take on the “social earthquake” of racism:

It was a tough assignment and only four hours to turn it around. We’d had a tipoff about an expat Texan who hung out on Freak Street. But finding him? The taxi stalled three miles out, roads churned to rubble, street signs gone. Phone lines dead. Asking around, we were met with blank stares. Kids wailing. Families sheltering under tarpaulin. Cardboard. Those with homes still standing terrified to go indoors.

We were filming a kid blubbing among the bricks that killed his parents when we found her, tears streaming prettily down pale-pink cheeks. “The holiday of a lifetime. Ruined.”

Okay, perhaps an exaggeration, but I do get irritated with reporting that seems to assume it’s easier to empathise with Westerners and those with white skin. But I’m interested that, although I wrote this before I read Jimfish, it seems consistent with the pessimism of that novel. What do you think?

Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
8 Comments
Charli Mills
3/5/2015 04:45:49 pm

While reading your review, I wavered in my consideration to read this book. Yes, it sounds like an important novel, and not that I need handrails, but I find that I grow defensive toward the very things I find oppressive, too.

For example, your flash. You wrote it before you read Jimfish and yet you feel it has similar pessimism toward reporting. I agree...I am pessimistic especially toward American media, yet I have friends and family who are journalists. For me, I need room to accept that it' mostly bad. But when I read something that portrays it as all bad, I feel there is no room for hope. Well, maybe that is a need for a handrail.

And your flash is spot on. We don't even realize that we categorize and side with those who fit "our" category. But the wailing child now orphan stabs at my heart and I feel resentful toward the tear-stained pink cheeks, lamenting a ruined vacation. Sometimes, our reactions to what writers bring up can be our lesson in awareness.

Reply
Annecdotist
4/5/2015 01:38:45 am

Thanks, Charli, I think we really do need our defences to get through the day. It's unusual for me feel so depressed about reading a novel, although when it came to writing my review, that feeling had gone and I wondered what all the fuss (in me) was about. I have to be grateful for my defences kicking in, even as I feel guilty for wanting to get myself from it.
We all live with contradictions and compromise, choosing not to focus on something just to get through the day. And we could say about journalists, at least they get to these hotspots to bring us those stories, often risking their lives to do so. They have their own adjustments to make in order to do their jobs.

Reply
Norah Colvin link
4/5/2015 01:01:07 am

This sounds like a confronting read, Anne. Sometimes they need to be confronting, though, to get the message across. I am constantly amazed at what one human can do to another. So much of it is totally abhorrent. How we change that, I don't know. A boxer has just been paid $200million for winning a fight. Another, $100million for losing. Why win when surely at that level there is little real difference in the value. People paid thousands of dollars to sit ringside, and then wanted their money back because . . . the fight wasn't brutal enough? People gawked through hotel doors and windows, others watched on big screens and at home. Until we eliminate the glorification of violence, how can we expect our society to be peaceful?
I love the message of your flash. We see it all the time. First world problems. Poor dear. She'll still have a family and home to 'go home' to. Contrast this with the boy who has lost his world: home and parents. But hey, he's just one of the multitude of nameless and faceless inhabitants of the non-industrialized world; not one of "ours". Who was the Texan they were looking for? Is it significant?

Reply
Annecdotist
4/5/2015 01:42:26 am

Didn't know this about the flight, sounds gruesome!
Glad you liked my flash – sorry if you were expecting more from the Texan, I just thought in my head (there's a stereotype) he'd be white. Unless you have other ideas for him?
In writing this, I was also conscious of the Boxing Day tsunami – I don't think we'd have heard so much about it if Western holidaymakers hadn't been caught up in it.

Reply
Norah Colvin link
7/5/2015 06:36:06 am

That is so true about the Boxing Day tsunami. There is so much that goes on we never hear about. So much rates a mention here only for the number of Australians involved.

Reply
Annecdotist
7/5/2015 08:02:11 am

In a way it's understandable that we are all somewhat parochial in our consumption of news and it's probably a positive factor in building and maintaining communities. But I do get annoyed when people seem to believe that the information they receive is all that there is an so that the West's tragedies will always trump any others.

Reply
geoff link
7/5/2015 04:40:42 pm

I'm with you on the slanted reporting of events so 'one Briton scratched' makes more news that 100,000,000 foreign types of colour dead. Like in the Not the Nine O'clock news sketch. It grates all the time. In a way like the Armenian genocide that rarely has the profile of other ones where the west was more involved (in ending it in the case of the Holocaust). I'm not good with books that want to drive home a message of unremitting gloom; I simply do not see it around us. Of course awful things go on and I wish they didn't but telling it like it is all doom, well, what I see, what I read, what I understand, that's errant nonsense. So if that's his message it's not a book for me.

Reply
Annecdotist
8/5/2015 09:29:39 am

I probably do tune in more to the gloom and doom (and not just today when I'm depressed about the election result) but I see the light as well. I don't know whether other readers would find it as disturbing as I did, and there is a little light at the end, but for me the problem was that it was too true and too important to make for a comfortable satire. I don't know that much about the author, so don't want to speak for him, but I suppose when you've pinned your hopes on an end to apartheid it's demoralising to see the poison seeping into other parts of the continent.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    finding truth through fiction
    Picture
    COMING IN 2020 FREE e-book of prize-winning short stories FOR ALL SUBSCRIBERS PLUS three chances to WIN a paperback copy of my next novel

    events coming soon:

    Picture
    Picture

    latest book:

    Picture
    Short stories on the theme of identity Published 2018
    Picture
    Annecdotal is where real life brushes up against the fictional.  
    Picture
    Annecdotist is the blogging persona of Anne Goodwin: 
    reader, writer,

    slug-slayer, tramper of moors, 
    recovering psychologist, 
    struggling soprano, 
    author of two novels.

    Picture
    My second novel published May 2017.
    Picture
    Picture
    My debut novel shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize
    Picture
    Picture
    LATEST POSTS HERE
    I don't post to a schedule, but average  around ten reviews a month (see here for an alphabetical list), 
    some linked to a weekly flash fiction, plus posts on writing and my journey to publication and beyond.  
    Your comments are welcome any time any where.

    Get new posts direct to your inbox ...

    Enter your email address:

    or click here …

    RSS Feed


    Subscribe to my newsletter for updates 3-4 times a year.
    Picture
    Picture

    2019 Reading Challenge

    2019 Reading Challenge
    Anne has read 19 books toward their goal of 100 books.
    hide
    19 of 100 (19%)
    view books
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Tweets by @Annecdotist
    Picture
    Read “Her Knight in Shining Armour”
    my latest short story hot off the press.
    Picture

    Popular posts

    • Compassion: something we all need
    • Do spoilers spoil?
    • How to create a convincing fictional therapist
    • Instructions for a novel
    • Looking at difference, embracing diversity
    • Never let me go: the dilemma of lending books
    • On loving, hating and writers’ block
      On Pop, Pirates and Plagiarism
    • READIN' for HER reviews
    • Relishing the cuts
    • The fast first draft
    • The tragedy of obedience
    • Writers and therapy: a love-hate relationship?
    Looking for something in particular? Sorry the blog has no search facility, but typing Annecdotal plus the keyword into Google usually works.
    Or try one of these:

    Categories/Tags

    All
    Animals
    Annecdotist Hosts
    Annecdotist On Tour
    Articles
    Attachment Theory
    Author Interviews
    Becoming Someone
    Being A Writer
    Blogging
    Bodies
    Body
    Books For Writers
    Bookshops
    CB Book Group
    Character
    Childhood
    Christmas
    Classics
    Closure
    Coming Of Age
    Counsellors Cafe
    Creative Writing Industry
    Creativity
    Cumbria
    Debut Novels
    Disability
    Editing
    Emotion
    Ethics
    Ethis
    Family
    Feedback And Critiques
    Fictional Psychologists & Therapists
    Food
    Friendship
    Futuristic
    Gender
    Genre
    Getting Published
    Giveaways
    Good Enough
    Grammar
    Gratitude
    Group/organisational Dynamics
    History
    Humour
    Identity
    Illness
    Independent Presses
    Institutions
    International Commemorative Day
    Jane Eyre
    Language
    LGBTQ
    Libraries
    Live Events
    Marketing
    Memoir
    Memory
    Mental Health
    Microfiction
    Motivation
    Music
    Names
    Narrative Voice
    Nature / Gardening
    Networking
    Newcastle
    Nonfiction
    Nottingham
    Novels
    Peak District
    Poetry
    Point Of View
    Politics
    Politics Current Affairs
    Presentation
    Privacy
    Prizes
    Psychoanalytic Theory
    Psychology
    Psycholoists Write
    Psychotherapy
    Race
    Racism
    Rants
    Reading
    Real Vs Imaginary
    Religion
    Repetitive Strain Injury
    Research
    Reviewing
    Romance
    Satire
    Second Novels
    Settings
    Sex
    Shakespeare
    Short Stories General
    Short Stories My Published
    Short Stories Others'
    Siblings
    Snowflake
    Storytelling
    Structure
    Sugar And Snails
    Technology
    The
    Therapy
    Tourism
    Transfiction
    Translation
    Trauma
    Unconscious
    Unconscious, The
    Underneath
    Voice Recognition Software
    War
    WaSBihC
    Weather
    Work
    Writing Process
    Writing Technique

    Archives

    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013

    Picture
    Picture
    BLOGGING COMMUNITIES
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    I'm honoured to receive these blog awards:
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    but no more, thanks, your comments are awesome enough
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
Photos used under Creative Commons from havens.michael34, romana klee, mrsdkrebs, Kyle Taylor, Dream It. Do It., adam & lucy, dluders, Joybot, Hammer51012, jorgempf, Sherif Salama, eyspahn, raniel diaz, E. E. Piphanies, scaredofbabies, Nomadic Lass, paulternate, Tony Fischer Photography, archer10 (Dennis), slightly everything, impbox, jonwick04, country_boy_shane, dok1, Out.of.Focus, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service - Midwest Region, Elvert Barnes, guillenperez, Richard Perry, jamesnaruke, Juan Carlos Arniz Sanz, El Tuerto, kona99, maveric2003, !anaughty!, Patrick Denker, David Davies, hamilcar_south, idleformat, Dave Goodman, Sharon Mollerus, photosteve101, La Citta Vita, A Girl With Tea, striatic, carlosfpardo, Damork, Elvert Barnes, UNE Photos, jurvetson, quinn.anya, BChristensen93, Joelk75, ashesmonroe, albertogp123, >littleyiye<, mudgalbharat, Swami Stream, Dicemanic, lovelihood, anyjazz65, Tjeerd, albastrica mititica, jimmiehomeschoolmom