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Russel Brownlee takes us inside Garden of the PlaguesTom Eaton
What led up to the writing of this novel? I wanted to write a historical novel. Just living and working here in Kloof Street and Long Street, I felt these rhythms that the city has. But I felt like an outsider - I'm from Johannesburg, and then I went to live in the Karoo for two years. That was my first break to write a novel. That was amazing but quite tough, to survive in the Karoo … But living here in Long Street, I thought I had a feeling of what those colonists might have felt - being away from home in this strange place. I had an image of the settlement a littler earlier, where you'd arrive and there would be nothing but a little mud fort - I think it would have been a very dark novel. But Garden of the Plagues really started when I heard the story of the Jesuits conducting what was the first scientific experiment here, and I was drawn by the idea of them bringing the Enlightenment here, in a very fluid, undeveloped form. They were trying to calculate latitudes and longitudes, but of course there was also a huge fascination with botany, especially amongst the Dutch overlords in Holland, who wanted everything labelled and classified. I think that's where this novel took root - I became interested in the question of names: When you name something, do you own it? So those were the influences that coalesced into the novel as it stands, into a kind of meditation on names and naming. Most of what I describe is factually accurate - the buildings, the size of the population, and so on - buy I wanted to keep the structure fairly free, with characters circling this place quite loosely. I also wanted to convey the landscape of the place - landscape is important to me - but without romanticising it. I wanted to convey a feeling of Cape Town before it became Cape Town. It was a fairly desperate place. The colonists didn't want to be here. Nobody wanted to be here. It was a destination for runaways and exiles and outcasts. What kind of research did you do? I spent time in the archives and at the South African Library, and in the library at the University of Cape Town. I found a variety of accounts of life at the Cape during this time - not so much diaries as notes taken on voyages, or laws passed by Simon van der Stel. Van der Stel's character was the most difficult to write. He started out as a caricature, and I had to try very hard to pull him away from that. He's such a well-known figure - everyone has an opinion on him. It was important to try to find out what he was about. I want to ask you more about him shortly, but first tell me, is this novel an indication that South African writing in English is becoming more wide-ranging and seeing itself as part of a larger historical and geographical world? I'd love to think so. I don't read as much by my compatriots as I'd like, but from what I've read I don't know if anyone else is really looking outward. They're writing about local issues that could be read or apply anywhere, whereas I very much wanted to link Africa and Europe. Dan Sleigh's novel Islands obviously has this broader focus and wider appeal, but from what I see we're still writing very much about modern South African concerns. It almost seems we're shy or scared of tackling big stories. Some social commentators have been suggesting over the past few years that Western society is busily rejecting the gains of the Enlightenment, as witnessed by the rise of fundamentalist religions, an increasingly widespread belief in the supernatural, and the triumph of emotion over logic and reason. To what extent does this novel engage with this cultural drift? I wasn't aware that there was a backlash against the Enlightenment, but I can see why there might be a general feeling that we've taken Positivism too far. In a way this novel goes back to the dawn of the Enlightenment, and leaves one to wonder where we went wrong (if we did go wrong), and to see what might have been done differently. Perhaps we can go back and look at what we've lost, which is perhaps a more humane outlook, in which science doesn't hold as much power as it does in our world. Which is really what Adam Wijk has to do, being torn as he is between science and the things that science (at least of his day) isn't able to confront. Precisely. He is a man of science - he feels he has to name and catalogue, but he is confronted by these unnameable things. Colonisation in this novel is still the domain of those in thrall to pre-Enlightenment beliefs, for example the Jesuits and to a certain extent Van der Stel (who, despite his desire to classify and control, still believes in the fantastical Monomatapa). Wijk, embodying the Enlightenment, has to retreat inward, into love and microscopics. This is an interestingly contrary view to the standard one that the colonial mission was all about imposing what was considered to be order and reason and sanity on a savage population. You present colonisation as conquest fuelled by naïve, almost fantastical ideals. No, I think colonisation is all about naming. Van der Stel seems to have had a vivid, pre-Enlightenment imagination, but that meant that he genuinely believed that Monomatapa could exist, and could be found and mapped and conquered. But after that failed expedition north to the Copper Mountains he became quite a lot harder as a person. He seemed to dedicate himself to being an administrator and commander, a coloniser. But he never wanted to leave. I think that's why Simon van der Stel has a special place in the heart of Afrikanerdom. He was the first European commander who wanted to make this place his own, and he put down roots here very early on. But he was also fairly ruthless, even brutal at times. Perhaps he recognised that if you're going to find Monomatapa, you have to be hard. In Van der Stel's character, with his intense but vague missionary yearnings, I felt I was looking at a forerunner - an ideological ancestor - of Conrad's Mr Kurtz. It's fantastic that readers can get those sorts of echoes in the text. I hadn't consciously thought of that connection, but yes, he's also very solitary. There is a scene in which he is up on the castle walls, looking out - it's a very hot day in February, with the dry wind blowing into his face - and he wonders about what it would be like to live in round huts and wrap entrails around his head. He's "gone native"? He's definitely gone native. That was a very important image. And it takes on a meaty irony during the diary sequences in London, which really seems to have devolved into a Heart of Darkness world, to the extent that there are bodies lying about and even heads on spikes. For his part Van der Stel seems to be at a point where he can go either way, and he happens to go the way of order and duty. It seems almost arbitrary, as if a flip of a coin - or a possible brush with plague - could have changed everything. I'm so glad that came through. That's why I felt it was so important to wrestle with his character. What emerged in my reading was someone who wasn't just a colonial overlord. He had an infectious enthusiasm. At times he was almost boyish. But at other times he was hard and dark and ruthless, and it was this aspect of his personality that eventually took over. I think it was that journey to Namaqualand in search of Monomatapa that turned him, once his dream was buried. When imagining the kind of letter he would like to write home to "Dear X", he muses that he would fill it with the kind of trivia that "perhaps meant something big and perhaps not". Many moments in this novel seem to have that quality - they might mean something big, and might not. This is, as André Brink writes on your blurb, "a radically new way of looking at our colonial past", in that the traditional white Nationalist view was that everything that happened at that time meant something big. I was trying to understand or sense a more feminine side to him, a side that might be this or might be that, rather more nuanced and changeable. There must have been that part of him that was yearning, that was lonely. I was trying to tap into those aspects of him that you won't find in history books, which present him as more superficial or as simply a patriot or a wicked coloniser. There's so much energy there, so much brightness. I get so frustrated by the writers, both black and white, who are appearing now and presenting historical figures in simplistic terms. Nobody is all good or all bad. If you take the time to delve into why a figure is good or bad, you'll always find a motivation that you can relate to. Are we guilty of retrospectively imposing Western middle-class mediocrity and morality on the past? Absolutely. If you're going to judge the actions and motivations of people who lived 300 years ago, you have to take into account how your own actions are going to be judged 300 years from now. It's easy to say these were evil people, but they were really people just like us. What that makes us is a different story! At the launch of the novel Michiel Heyns referred to the third line, in which the whale lies watching the people on the shore, and the people watch it back. I hadn't seen it myself, but he suggested that it was a kind of stalemate - there's not going to be a winner. That's the spirit I wanted to convey. There's no universal right or wrong. Similarly, there's the stand-off between science and superstition. You can't condemn science - simply because it's so glorious - but you also can't write off people's beliefs. I suppose that's why we write novels, to get a texture or a feeling, simply because we can't know anyone for sure. One of the inspirations for this book was Rose Tremain's Music and Silence, which also features a collection of characters whose stories are loosely interwoven. It doesn't pass judgement or prescribe moral attitudes to the reader - it just presents these people, and moves on. I'm looking for new novels now in South Africa that also relinquish control - I'm very under-read but I have found Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk. It's the most brilliant novel. There are two moments in the novel where an absence is described. Something is missing that can't be named, first from the garden and then from Wijk's patron's display cabinet; and this entire novel leaves one feeling that something is missing that can't be found or named. As a reader I didn't want it to be found or named, but would you as author be comfortable trying to say what it is? No, it's unnameable. It's that sense that we all have of being indefinable. Sometimes all meaning just seems to fall away and leave you standing there struggling to know anything. I think as soon as you try to name or categorise this experience you've got religion, or at the very least dogma starts appearing. It's the old question: What can we know? Who do we know? And when we think we know someone or something, what is it that we think we know? And when I ask myself "What do I know?", who is the person asking that? (Laughs) That way madness lies … That's going to be the next book I've started toying with. You've approached Cape Town very unromantically. The novel definitely looks at it through a historian's eyes, and shows it to be a wretched little backwater. At no stage do you wax purple about its potential, or even give any indication that you care whether it gets wiped flat or abandoned or developed into the place it is today. I think that goes back to my feelings about the city. I've been here six years now, and I still don't feel like a Capetonian. I wonder what it takes be part of the Cape Town? In Johannesburg you're part of the city the day you arrive, but here …? I don't know if Capetonians even feel like Capetonians. Perhaps it's because everything in the city is so beautiful. The people, the tourists, the scenery. I've lived here in the city bowl, and everything looks so wonderful, and yet I've kept wondering when it's all going to end. You know, when are we going to get real about this town? It's just a holiday destination now. Money is important, as are looks. It's glitzy and shallow. It's always just been a way-station. Perhaps some of the old families of Cape Town feel at home here. And that's a tiny group. Perhaps as many people as inhabit the settlement in your novel. You can build Johannesburg, but you can't do the same for Cape Town. It's got this mountain and this bowl … You've done something quite brave for a white South African novelist in presenting the "bosjeman" Voog in completely animalistic terms. You made no attempt to apologise for how you portrayed him. You simply stuck him on his perch like a little bird and left him. When you were writing this, were you worried about the politics involved, and what did you decide about that? I decided to go ahead, but to check at various stages with (my supervisor) André Brink. I think the scenes involving Voog are written ironically enough to convey the attitudes and beliefs of the people dealing with him. It's dark and quite off-hand, but this is how it was. I don't think a reader's sympathy will be anywhere but with Voog. Your syntax is quite striking. The novel reads just as I imagine 17th-century Dutch sounded to the Dutch. Your writing has been called poetic, but this is a bit of a tired phrase, and I don't think it accurately describes what you're doing here: it's too honest and sensible. Was your use of language carefully controlled and deliberate? The language is very important. It's almost the first thing I think about. Even before an actual story arrives, I have a feel for the language and its rhythm. In this novel I had a feeling for Adam Wijk walking down through his garden, a Baroque mood, and he seemed to have a controlled rhythm - ka-chunk ka-chunk ka-chunk ka-chunk - ordered. Of course there are also Baroque trills, when the language almost gets a little overwrought, but I hope they aren't overdone. Gilded, but not too much. I think it's an indication of how well you maintained the "Dutch" voice that the diary entries seemed entirely different. They felt English, had that English aggression of intellect one senses in works of the day. The diary was strongly influenced by English writers during that era. I read Samuel Pepys's diaries - he was in London during the plague - and also some notes by Daniel Defoe. The (very positive) review in the Mail & Guardian said that the novel was loosely structured, and at times a little too loosely structured … (Laughs) Ja, I must show the reviewer chapter and verse about the bloody underpants … … but the second half of the book does have a fairly loose structure. Characters arrive in droves, and then some disappear, which strongly suggests that the settlement is growing and at the same time unravelling. Which is why the ending, with the wonderful revelations about the mysterious woman (about which we'll say no more for those who haven't yet read the book!) is so striking. You've really pinned your narrative colours to the mast, which is rare for a new South African novelist. I thought, this is my third novel, it's the one that's going to get published. I've improved my technique, I'm going to try something quite ambitious, but the ending has to provide resolution. I wanted the reader to finish the book and feel satisfied. I didn't want it to be too academic. That will come in my next novel. For this one, I wanted to write a novel that had a lot going on in it, not all of which is clearly defined, but I also wanted it to provide entertainment and pleasure. Are we wrong to imagine that most newer South African novels lean towards being enigmatic rather than traditionally satisfying? I think it's because of the Big Three, Coetzee, Brink and Gordimer. We're all trying to emulate them, but perhaps without recognising that what they're doing is unique to their own voices. Someone pointed out recently that Kafka looms large over South African literature, and I think it's true. So many of the newer books are introspective and dark. Sometimes there seems to be no heart, because they're trying to be something that their authors don't quite understand. Not that you always need resolution. I read my novel the other night and I thought, God, there are all these loose ends; but I don't think these stories can be tied up. The novel as an art form allows them to stay unresolved. You know how it is when you've gone to see a movie, and you walk out and realise it had a hole in the plot big enough to drive a truck through, but it still held you, and choked you up. That's what art can do.
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