Fiction Review

Justin Pfefferle

The Impostor
By Damon Galgut
Toronto, ON: Emblem Editions (McClelland & Stewart), 2009
256 pp. $19.99

The Impostor, Damon Galgut’s much-anticipated follow-up to his acclaimed 2003 novel The Good Doctor, documents six months in the life of Adam Napier, a “bourgeois city type” (112) forced to take residence in a dilapidated farmhouse outside Cape Town, South Africa.

Armed with a naive desire to write poetry – “to speak,” as Galgut’s narrator puts it, “with childlike simplicity about nature” (143) – Adam soon becomes haunted by the ghosts of South Africa, a country ravaged by the violences and racialized politics of apartheid. While he communicates with these ghosts, Adam develops a dangerous fascination with Canning, a forgotten childhood acquaintance who views him, inexplicably, as his hero, and with Baby, an enigmatic black woman and Canning’s second wife. Adam’s fascination with this couple leads him into an explosive sexual intrigue and unwitting involvement in an illegal venture to desecrate the landscape and erase the past. Adam quickly realizes, however, that “the dark and dirty past of South Africa” (171) cannot so easily be erased; before long, the dormant past emerges in ways that threaten to shock the present and throw the political future of the country into turmoil.

Galgut’s subject is the so-called “New South Africa.” Between 1948 and 1994, the country was governed by the National Party, which enforced a system of racial segregation that placed blacks and “coloureds” in near-feudal relations with the white Afrikaner minority. Between those years, popular uprisings and resistance groups met with police brutality, and key figures in the resistance, including Steve Biko (who was murdered while in prison) and Nelson Mandela were jailed. Mandela was freed from prison in 1990; in 1994, he led the African National Congress Party to an overwhelming victory in the South African General Election. While South Africa has promoted itself since then as a “Rainbow Nation” of coexisting racial identities, there remains to this day what Shashank Bengali describes as a “deep malaise”: widespread political corruption, communities deprived of electricity, running water, and affordable housing, and instances of violence that have encouraged the young and educated to leave the country. As Bengali reports:

In Alexandra Township, just outside Johannesburg, Joyce Mlambo can recall the euphoria of 1994, when she stood in line for hours to vote ANC and danced with her neighbours late into the night after the results were announced. Mlambo, now 50, expected that a black-led government would elevate her from the one-room shack where she raised seven children. Today, she still earns $2 a day at her termite-eaten fruit stall and survives on welfare payments.

The imagined South Africa of Galgut’s novel is one fraught with the tensions of decades – indeed centuries – of colonial rule and government-endorsed racism. When we meet Adam, his life has just been turned upside-down by the political processes of post-apartheid: “racial quotas” have meant that “the young black intern he’d been training for the past six months was, in fact, being groomed to replace him,” and his house has become uninhabitable and impossible to sell, situated as it is in a neighbourhood with “the gangsters taking over, the squatters moving in, the crime and drugs getting worse and worse” (15). Adam thus takes refuge in a house owned by his brother, Gavin, an unscrupulous and apolitical capitalist who bought the house “dirt cheap” (8) with a mind to making it profitable. Like David Lurie, the protagonist in J.M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning novel Disgrace, Adam discovers the disquieting and contradictory truths about the “New South Africa” in the country, where he is subject to the physical and psychological vulnerabilities of raw existence. Here, too, he comes face-to-face with his own complicity in a history of violence, a history that has, ironically, led to his own banishment from the garden of white privilege.

The novel takes on the character of a Bildungsroman, as the protagonist moves along a narrative trajectory from innocence and naïveté to culpability and political understanding. Within so self-conscious (and, it must be stated, so European) a narrative mode, Galgut is able to meditate not only on the cultural dynamics of “New South Africa,” but on the possibilities and functions of writing literature in such a climate as well. Adam finds that “Poetry was beyond him” (41), and in fact abandons his ambitions to authorship soon after moving into the house. Yet the strength of The Impostor testifies to the manifold potentials for writing fiction, particularly novels, in a polyglot nation state, adding its author’s voice to the cacophony of writers demanding attention be paid to what is perhaps the most important political situation of our time.

The Impostor is a masterwork in all senses of the word. All of Galgut’s sentences are tough and memorable, and the novel continues to move, surprise, and unsettle its reader until its startling finale. Indeed, Galgut’s novel is one of those rare works that matter as much aesthetically as they do politically, a feat that places him comfortably alongside writers like Solzhenitsyn, Conrad, Anita Desai, and of course Coetzee (not Nadine Gordimer, though, whose neo-Liberalism lends itself all-too-frequently to a chauvinistic cultural conservatism). The Impostor is, in short, a haunting novel; like the history it grapples with, it promises to haunt us far into the intertwined future of novels and nation states.