Book Review: Gone to the Forest by Katie Kitamura

‘The country was in turmoil. And there was besides: sickness and growing and dying. How could they do anything but give in, to what was obvious, rather than what was good? In the face of that accumulation.’

Katie Kitamura’s debut novel, The Longshot, was one of the unexpected delights that come along only too rarely. The story of the final fight by a not-quite brilliant Mixed Martial Arts fighter, it managed to recreate the computer game feeling of having an opponent reach into my chest, pluck my heart out, and holding it aloft, gently squeezing it, from first sentence to final image. It revealed Kitamura as a brilliant writer in her own right; and an air to the minimalist legacy of Hemingway, McCarthy and Coertzee.

Gone to the Forest (The Clerkenwell Press, 2013) confirms such comparisons as entirely appropriate. With sharp, slashing prose and perfectly balanced storytelling, Kitamura explores the death throes of colonialism in a nameless nation.

Tom and his father live on a large rural farm. Ever since he came to the country, the old man has bent everything to him. His unremitting desire, big personality, and ruthless control ensure the farm has been successful, all those around him reliant on him for their safe orbit. But now disruption and native rebellion in the country threatens all he has built, and ill health begins to catch up with him. Tom, cowering in his father’s shadow, has eyes only for the land. It is all he has known. Other farmers circle, danger looms. And when a woman named Carine arrives, the future – whatever it holds – begins to bear down upon them.

In a chapter of pounding intensity, Kitamura brings these man-made tensions together in the midst of a massive volcanic eruption. Fire and brimstone filling the sky. Blocking out the sun. Then covering the land in ash that falls relentlessly. Sending animals wild and driving people to recklessness. It’s a powerful metaphor, the earth purging itself of colonial rule. The cataclysm that births a new age. Identities are questioned, relationships strained.

There’s much Coetzee here, a sort of mix of the wild frontiers of Waiting for the Barbarians and the search for peace away from troubled times of Life and Times ofMichael K. What is particularly clever is the way that Kitamura subtly questions notions of affinity with a landscape. Where much literature associates native peoples with affinity for the land, here it the character of Tom – slow, passive, uncertain; Michael K with privilege – who longs for nothing other than to escape people and live in peace with the landscape. But he is less resourceful than Michael K. Where Coetzee’s character bends a spoon to a natural well and drinks a thimble full at a time – ‘in that way, one can live’ – one does not have the feeling Tom would survive long. And his father’s health is rapidly failing.

On the other hand, the natives here ‘do not believe in property until it is theirs’, at which point they subject it entirely to their will. Cut it up into little pieces. This is the story of the colonialists, but that is not to say that this is a pro-colonial book. It is not pro-anything. Merely presents a series of characters in a fresh light, and the tragedies of upheaval.

Gone to the Forest is a tense, expertly controlled novel. One to read in one sitting. It is short, and the prose races along at a pace not even change can keep up with. Katie Kitamura is one of the most exciting voices in contemporary writing, and this is a marvellous addition to the already heaving realms of colonial/post colonial literature. If writers made swords, Kitamura would be the sort fabled in a Tarantino film. You will not find sharper, finer minimalist prose anywhere. 

Boyhood - J.M. Coetzee

Day 9 of the Books, Time, and Silence 10 Days of Christmas

Read: August 2009

Boyhood in one Tweet-sized chunk:
One of the richest and most rewarding insights into the experience of childhood you will ever read.

Boyhood is the first of John Coetzee's fictionalised biographies, telling the story of his childhood, from birth through to adolescence. Told with the redolent economic prose and exact lyricism that won him the Nobel Prize, it is a searingly self aware, 'warts and all' view of childhood in 1940s and 50s South Africa and an insight into the mentality of the man Coetzee feels himself to be.

We meet John aged eight or nine, a precocious child with an appetite for learning but few social skills. Outside the homestead he is a shy, retiring type, but at home he becomes something of a tyrant, a demanding and difficult child who craves and disdains love in equal measure.

The Coetzee's live in Worcester, a small city 90 miles from Cape Town in the Afrikaner heartlands of the Karoo. They are middle class Africaner, who by virtue of education “prefer to be English”. His father, a government official/lawyer, has a tendency toward alcohol, and his mother believes that “studying is just nonsense”. Although he has a brother who barely appears, John is a solitary child, a sickly and bookish boy with an active imagination. When choosing sides in the Cold War he picks the Russians because the capital R is “the strongest of all the letters.” He spins glorious fantasies of Troy and of British valour at Dunkirk and devises an automated bowling machine so he can play cricket alone in the garden. He is happiest when he is playing by himself.

Yet for all his precocity, John is distinctly unimpressed with the sort of person he is. Boyhood chronicles not only the promise that literature provides him for escape from provincial tedium, but the weakness and vulnerability of childhood too. He is only too aware of his social shortcomings, and lives a life of doubt, anxiety and self-derision. He is haunted by what seem to be routine and harmless events: getting his hair cut is a “remorseless” experience that leaves him “squirming with shame”, while the very idea of being late for school precipitates nightmares in which “he weeps in helpless despair”.

At school he is an outsider whatever he does. Unlike the other kids he has never been caned, and lives in perpetual fear of it happening. He would like to be beaten, if only once, in order to fit in. It becomes a right of passage to him, but one he cannot bring himself to effect. He tries to go bare foot like the Afrikaans boys, but when his feet hurt instead of sympathy is met by derision from the other boys. When forced to specify his religion at school he makes a spur of the moment decision to identify as Catholic and finds himself ostracised, not only from the protestant and Anglican majority, but the other Catholics who mistrust him and suspect he has lied.

Behind all of this lies apartheid: silent and insidious and vile. If his mother calls to a black man in the street they must come and do her bidding. There are no black children at the school. Yet the apartheid isn't the only social tension, the Afrikaners are ostracised too, their language, poverty and rural ways making them almost as maligned. It is a world the young John feels horribly uncomfortable in, but he is too young to understand quite why. He wants to write, and if he did he would write about “something dark,” something that reflects the world he lives in.

What he does understand is the dynamics of his family. He spends much of his time dissecting and evaluating them, establishing his role within the family and the effect they have on him. He sees himself in his father and for that reason cannot stand to be around him. Of his mother he is more conflicted: torn somewhere between cloying obsession and raging against the claustrophobia of her love. He is made weak by this love which he craves and goes great lengths to inspire, yet lives in fear that his ''ugly, black, crying, babyish core” will be revealed. She has turned him into “something unnatural, something that needs to be protected if it is to continue to live.”

He loves and hates his mother as Coetzee the writer loves and hates many of his female characters. He describes himself as twice-born: once from woman and once from the family farm in Voelfontein. And it is here, where they visit once a year, the young John feels most at home. He “loves every stone of it, every bush, every blade of grass, loves the birds that give it its name, birds that as dusk falls gather in their thousands in the trees around the fountain, calling to each other, murmuring, ruffling their feathers, settling in for the night.” It is is a place he feels free, and a place he returns to in Summertime. “The farm is his secret fate.”

The landscapes of his fiction are scattered throughout, most notably in the relationship he feels for Voelfontein which mirrors that of the farm in Life and Times of Michael K. Yet what is perhaps most skilled in Boyhood is that it does not read as a work of revisionist history, demonstrating that the young Coetzee was always destined to be a writer. As in Youth it rarely evident that he is to become one of the leading novelists of his generation. At the end, however, there is a tantalising clue. Boyhood ends, as many do, with the death of a relative and John wondering what will happen to her stockpile of stories. Who will remember them now that she is gone?

Boyhood is a very real, very honest account of childhood, with its joys – cycling around the neighbourhood and going to the cinema – as well as its struggles. As a work of autobiography it is a warm and funny, yet run through with deep discomfort. As with all biographies, it says as much about the person writing it as it does its subject but what resounds throughout is a sense of childhood, a sense that even if it is partly Coetzee projecting his adult self onto the person he was, he is aware enough, and skilled enough as a storyteller, to inhabit his character. The result is one of the richest and most rewarding insights into the experience of childhood you will ever read.


7 out of 10

Life and Times of Michael K - J.M. Coetzee

Read: Feb 2008

In a country ripped apart by civil war, a simple gardener sets out to return his mother to her rural birthplace. But standing in the way of them is the vast bureaucracy of wartime administration: passes and permits and visas must be obtained, patiently waited for while social order gradually breaks down. Eventually they decide to walk, Michael pushing his mother in a modified wheelbarrow, following the roads and hiding in the undergrowth whenever a truck appears of the horizon. But Michael’s mother dies on the way, plugged into machines in a hospital while he is banished from her side. When he returns an overworked nurse hands him a box of ashes and he is left alone in a rapidly disintegrating world. So he retreats into the mountains, and the veld, vast empty spaces where he can be alone and live his own life, peaceful and untroubled by the wider world and its wars. After a time he is picked up and taken to a semantically disguised prison camp and forced to work for his living. But Michael is unable to stand this confinement and unwilling to break his back rebuilding a human world which everyone else seems to want to blow up and so he escapes and returns to his mothers place of birth, to join the long line of children in his family history, tending to the earth and hiding from everyone who comes his way.

Imagine the roving dogs of Disgrace and morph them into myriad different armies and battalions and you can picture the sort of anarchic yet dictatorial world Michael finds himself in. But he wants nothing to do with that absurd world; all he wishes is to be left alone to luxuriate in the peaceful natural world around him. To bend his head to the soil and crawl along, buglike, in the shadows as he encourages seeds to grow and live. He is a man of nature, doesn’t belong in such a harsh, fast world, and his will to survive on his own terms makes for an enthralling novel.

Coetzee’s Booker winning tale of incidental defiance is simply written, without pretence or fuss, just like its eponymous character. And in its simplicity all the facets of life are enunciated, so blindingly obvious it is wonder we cannot all follow them. His is a simple, universal truth. We follow Michael as he bounces from one man-made atrocity to another, never contaminated by the horrors of the world around him. Although at first he struggles to live – hunting, killing, cooking, storing – he is soon worn down by the pace of life and retreats into his own, internal and spiritual life, cut off from everyone else, living as if on a different timescale, a different planet, to the other characters.

Life and Times of Michael K is a beautiful novel. Coetzee’s impassioned tone implores sense into the world, urges the simpler things in life, the need for time and space and the importance of nature over and above the precarious structures man seeks to impose upon it. At its heart this is another of Coetzee’s paeans to South Africa, its immense, desolate land and the space it should offer. It may be set against a backdrop of apartheid civil war, but is never about divisive issues like race. Rather it honours the unique in us all, the common humanity and the uniform suffering of war. It is about the relationship between man and nature, between a gardener and his land, man-made clock time and the slowly ululating time of nature. As you read on it becomes increasingly obvious that Michael is not suited to life, that his style of simple living cannot survive in such a harsh world. He is both an intensely lovable and infuriatingly frustrating character, he has virtually no voice of his own, no inner monologue to commentate on the events he is experiencing, to make sense of his strange mind. Some may find this frustrating, and it certainly takes the emotional heart of the novel further away, just out of the readers grasp. But that is the point, what good would Michael K’s unique attitude to life be if he saw the world and talked about it and thought about it the way everyone else does. It is his refusal to take part in any aspect of common life which makes him such an enthralling character. As another reviewer writes (so coherently that I have to quote here):

“In a society in which a whole group of its citizens is accorded no value, what happens when one of them values himself even less? The answer: he becomes like a double negative; and double negatives become positives. 'The obscurest of the obscure,' as Coetzee puts it, 'so obscure as to be a prodigy.'”

Relating to Michael K is impossible, it would be like relating to God, or the Queen. Their entire plain of existence is so dramatically different as to be mind boggling. But it is beautiful just watching. And in the end it is a real delight to find such a profoundly resonant and understated final image: Michael, standing in his garden with a broken well before him, bending a tiny spoon, tying rope around it and drawing water from the earth one spoon at a time. “In that way,” he says, “one can live.”

8 out 10