There’s been quite a buzz about the ten best-selling books of the decade, with the Fifty Shades trilogy taking the top three slots, but what interested me was seeing The Girl on The Train (Paula Hawkins) and Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn) neck-and-neck in sixth and seventh positions. I read both with an uneasy kind of fascination, and can’t say I enjoyed them — not a single likeable character in either — but they (and other similar books) have had me pondering the rise of the unreliable woman narrator. Clearly this makes books sell like hot cakes.
It’s been especially interesting placing the woman narrator who can’t be trusted in fiction alongside the parallel social and cultural explosion of the #MeToo movement and its auxiliary #BelieveHer. The overlapping of these arenas raises the thorny question of how to write about sexual violence, always tricky territory for writers, but equally an area in which novels of every stripe are supplying refreshing, disruptive and subversive treatments of what is, appallingly, a ubiquitous experience for many women, far too many children and some men.
In 2019, two South African novelists wrote gripping novels in which rape is the generating event: Fiona Snyckers produced the extraordinary Lacuna, a response to J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace (except that it’s so much more); and Alex van Tonder launched A Walk at Midnight, a noir semi-thriller full of spiky twists. Although both books explore the long-term effects of rape in detail, both are highly entertaining reads, with page-turning pace. They’re not unduly bleak or distressing; in fact, there is something to celebrate in the ways their slippery, sometimes infuriating, but always intriguing heroines pursue the conclusions and closures they need, or think they need. Snyckers’s novel is often laugh-out-loud funny, as she skewers one sacred cow after another. Van Tonder provides a backdrop of sparky and quirky commentary on modern trends and values; set in the USA, it clearly reflects the climate of the Stanford sexual assault case and the Kavanaugh hearings.
Both novels have central woman characters who, the reader swiftly learns, cannot be trusted. And yet, and yet: they can. One thing that moved me about both books is that in a world where women’s accounts of rape are automatically distrusted, it becomes necessary when telling these painful truths to “tell it slant” — as Emily Dickinson said. Both novels use multiple voices to present different perspectives; in Lacuna the voices are mostly in Lucy’s head, including some very funny and often poignant imaginary (or are they?) conversations she has with her therapist. In van Tonder’s novel, a cast of family members and friends all chime in with contradictory accounts of a troubled marriage.
Snyckers’s project is explicit and political: at the very beginning, she announces her intention to give a voice to the silent, stoic character of Lucy Lurie, who in Coetzee’s Disgrace is gang-raped and impregnated by a pack of feral, faceless black men. She boldly tackles and disrupts the highly problematic gendered and racial readings this narrative seems to endorse, to provide a complex and yet compulsively readable response to the disturbing (to me, anyway) use of rape as a metaphor for post-apartheid retribution and reconciliation.
A Walk At Midnight begins like a conventional whodunnit: the police are interviewing the apparently flawless Jane Robson, whose husband has just died in circumstances near-identical to a murder described in her forthcoming novel. It’s almost impossible to describe what happens next without giving spoilers, especially in a novel this twisty. I did struggle at first with the premise that one could become a very senior political figure with two past rape charges to one’s name — until I remembered the pussy-grabbing monstrosity currently inhabiting America’s White House. So although there are plot elements that stretch credulity, nothing in van Tonder’s story hasn’t already happened in real life — and right under our noses.
One of the most devastating things about sexual violence is how often it happens at the hands of those we trust; in which cases it can be the betrayal more than the assault that does the damage. Both these novels focus our gaze on the monster nearby; unsettling, and yet somehow also a relief. These are not exactly beach reads; but they’re absorbing, satisfying, and bound to start some lively debates, with Lacuna in particular a layered work that is richly rewarding to re-read.
Festive quotient: excellent for when you emerge from a plum pudding coma and want something a little more dark and stimulating than Lindt Intense. Also great for warding off uncles who get a little hands-y after two rounds of brandy and coke. In fact, both books will put a steely glint in your eye that will make creepy relatives give you a wide berth.
*Disclaimer/disclosure: I edited Lacuna (and have also edited several other of Fiona’s novels); and although I had nothing to do with the production of A Walk of Midnight, I’ve assessed other manuscripts by Alex in the past. I’m thrilled to witness the development of their writing careers.
