Past due: Greg Bottoms on Damon Galgut.

THE GOOD DOCTOR

BY DAMON GALGUT

NEW YORK: GROVE PRESS. 215 PAGES. $12.

THE QUARRY

BY DAMON GALGUT

NEW YORK: GROVE PRESS. 169 PAGES. $12.

I first read South African writer Damon Galgut this summer in the Canadian magazine The Walrus. The short story that appeared there, "An African Sermon," had echoes of J. M. Coetzee, Graham Greene, and Joseph Conrad at his postcolonial best ("Heart of Darkness," "An Outpost of Progress"). Galgut's protagonist in the story is a well-meaning white minister traveling from Pretoria to Cape Town, to his new post at a down-on-its-luck, post-apartheid church. On the train to his destination, he shares a car with an African who tells of the atrocities he has witnessed in Rwanda, including the brutal torture and death of his own family. The minister, having been moved by the story, later uses it as part of his first sermon, an idealized and simplistic tale of Christian forgiveness in the face of even the worst crimes. Later, watching television, the minister sees the African from the train under arrest--for multiple tortures and murders in Rwanda, some of which he committed against members of his own family.

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An acclaimed and accomplished South African novelist and playwright, Galgut is justly compared, nowadays, to Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, and Andre Brink. He is the author of five novels, the first of which, A Sinless Season (1982), he wrote at seventeen. His most recent, The Good Doctor, was short-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize, and The Quarry, which appeared in South Africa in 1995, when Galgut was thirty-two, has just been released in paperback in the United States. The tales people tell in Galgut's bleak Africa are more often than not falsehoods culled from facts, almost subconscious efforts to erase the realities of the tragic political past in order to avoid being trampled by the present. Both the African and the minister, the reader understands at the end of "An African Sermon," are guilty of fabrication in an effort to get near the truth--using only the most convenient aspects of the past--even as they shun its oppressive totality. The events themselves are compelling, obviously, but the power of the story, as with any fine fiction, is largely a product of its delivery--the controlled, evocative prose; the pacing and scenic choreography; the final Chekhovian move toward a certainty that, in the course of one well-wrought passage, is destroyed in favor of a stark, uncompromisingly complex realism.

As it turns out, "An African Sermon" was a good introduction to Galgut. Empty idealism and delusional thinking in the face of the real day-to-day chaos and tragedy of Africa as a whole, and South Africa in particular, is Galgut's grand theme. The Good Doctor is the story of Frank Eloff, a cynical white physician who has fled to a remote and underfunded hospital in a former South African "homeland"--land that was once set aside for black "self-rule" by the former apartheid government and has now been reduced to a wasteland. Frank's life is in shambles: His wife has left him for his best friend and former business partner; his career has been reduced to an unsatisfactory job; and he has been at the hospital, which he refers to as a "twilight place," for "six or seven" years, waiting patiently to take over as its director from an African physician who is always about to leave for a better position but never actually does. Enter Laurence Waters, the character of the title, a young and idealistic white doctor, reminiscent of the young minister in "An African Sermon," who is determined to make a difference for the suffering Africans of this region. Frank and Laurence indeed serve as foils to one another, and the novel, complete with a noirish narrator and a thrillerlike dramatic construction, is a fast and powerful read, speeding toward what we understand from the beginning will end in catastrophe.

The plot of The Good Doctor deals mainly with Laurence's strict moral stances and his ultimately ill-fated efforts to provide medical assistance and hope to the inhabitants of the abandoned and violent South African countryside. Frank encourages this noble effort, selfishly, in order to better his own situation, even though he knows of the dangers. Were the book as simple as that--a guilty narrator recounting his complicated crime; an entertainment, as Greene referred to some of his books--it would still be a fine novel, sort of like James M. Cain writing South Africa. However, it is Galgut's building of the tale upon rich and intricately intertwined subplots--the interaction between Frank's "liberal" parents and their black maid (who, in an excruciating scene, we see on her hands and knees picking up dead petals from a decorative floral arrangement); Frank's wife and ex-business partner planning a move to Australia together because South Africa has become an unlivable country; Frank's own selfish affair with a poor African shopkeeper, which endangers the woman's life; Frank's past stint in the army, where he powerlessly witnessed torture; and Frank's seduction of Laurence's girlfriend, an African-American woman who has changed her name to sound African (a swipe at empty liberal gestures)--that conveys the moral and political seriousness of the novel. There are no easy answers, Frank tells us, and if there is a weakness to this book it is that this sentiment is perhaps stated too often.

By contrast there is The Quarry, a ten-year-old formal experiment and morality tale, which is of a different, lesser order altogether. It is not a bad book compared with what sometimes passes for literary fiction, but it comes across as fairly atrocious if you have just put down, as I had, Galgut's prizeworthy newer work. The Quarry tells the story of a nameless drifter who has recently escaped from incarceration, the reason for which is never revealed. He ambles, exhausted, out of the brush and onto a desolate road, where he is picked up by a minister (another moral authority figure to be taken down a notch) on his way to a remote and underfunded church in the dry, hot backcountry of South Africa. The two men stop at an abandoned stone quarry on the outskirts of town. After the minister tells the lengthy tale of his life--about how he is starting over, going to a place he has never been, to preach and marry and bury people he has never met--he makes a sexual advance toward the unnamed drifter. "You owe me," the minister says. A fight ensues and the drifter kills him. Galgut writes: "The minister was quite dead then. He lay transfixed by an extremity of stillness and only the dust bore witness to his final convulsion in an etching of scuff-marks and lines.... The sun was almost on the horizon and it had cooled into a red coin but of what currency or what value the man didn't know and he walked to a log nearby and sat."

This mythic tone comes off as mannered, by turns either minimalist or rococo, and reads like a shaky homage to Cormac McCarthy's quasi-biblical style in Child of God and Outer Dark. After the killing, the drifter assumes the identity of the minister, and one of his first duties is to bury the body found in the quarry. Two petty criminals are later pegged for the crime, after being found wearing the real minister's clothing. A circus comes to town. A trial happens--the whole town shows up--and during the trial, no kidding, an escaped animal (a lion?) runs through the church-cum-court room, interrupting the proceedings and allowing one of the accused to escape (deus exfeline, I guess). The drifter goes mad for a moment (an occurrence that seems to have little grounding in prior character development), then comes to his senses and confesses to the town police captain, who seems to be one of the Village People, obsessed with polishing the gas tank of his motorcycle while not wearing a shirt and having much poetic attention drawn to his nipples. In fact, in the midst of all of this is some seriously high-camp homoerotic stuff between the drifter and the captain. Galgut--a gay man who has avoided the confining moniker of "gay novelist"--writes: "He got on to the seat behind him [the captain]. He had his bible down the front of his shirt. He put his arms around the policeman and pressed his chest to his spine and enclosed in this unlikely embrace the two men moved forward together." The book concludes, in foreboding, overblown prose, with a chase across the veldt, written in cryptic, one-paragraph chapters. What begins as a promising, if self-conscious, thriller quickly turns into something more reminiscent of Ed Wood than of Galgut's current work.

Perhaps there's a lesson in this. It is a common mystification to think brilliant writers spring onto the scene fully formed, when in fact they almost always labor and improve over long years. Given Galgut's gargantuan subject--a nation in violent flux, a culture grappling with a new identity in the face of an oppressive past--it's understandable that he has struggled to find a suitable narrative form. His recent fiction, though, which deftly unearths South Africa's troubled history, has indeed been years in the making. Let's look forward to his next novel and, like one of his protagonists, avoid the past.

Greg Bottoms's memoir, Angelhead: My Brother's Descent into Madness, is being reissued in paper-back this spring by the University of Chicago Press.