The Shouting in the Dark<\/em> Set in the 1970s, when hardliner B. J. Vorster is Prime Minister of South Africa, Elleke Boehmer\u2019s portrayal of a young girl growing up in a dysfunctional Afrikaans family in the small dormitory town of Braemar, fifty miles inland from Durban, South Africa, is almost Gothic in its disturbing darkness, both physical and metaphorical. Much of the narrative takes place at night, when the young protagonist, Ella, reveals most about her angry father and depressed mother, and their entwined lives. Indeed her life for much of the novel is defined by what happens in the stultifyingly confined family home during those long hours of darkness.<\/p>\n Ella lives with her parents, Irene and Har, who immigrated from Holland after the Second World War. Both parents are seemingly damaged beyond repair by the time we meet them. Har\u2019s first wife, after whom Ella is named, was Irene\u2019s sister, who died tragically young of cancer. Har returned to Holland, courted his dead wife\u2019s sister, married her and brought her back to South Africa. As Ella\u2019s mother, Irene, explains to her: \u201cSee, he wanted someone after his loss, Ella, and not just anyone. Loving my sister as I did, I was happy to stand in. How could I have known it would be like this, a lifelong walk in her shadow\u201d (p. 63).<\/p>\n The first (deceased) Ella\u2019s portrait has pride of place on the sitting room wall and watches over the family, ensuring the impossibility of happiness for anyone else. It was like a South African Rebecca de Wynter, sucking the life force of those left behind, for she is the good wife, the vibrant wife, the wife who should have lived. Har soon comes to despise his second wife \u2013 who, as a result, is enfeebled, made weak, and is afraid of her own shadow.<\/p>\n Named for her dead aunt, Ella grows up in an atmosphere of regret mingled with fear (from her mother), coupled with anger and disappointment (from her father). She survives, initially, by making herself as invisible as possible, watching, listening, but almost never acting. As the bildungsroman of her life develops, her father\u2019s unreasonable behaviour, his racism, his all-consuming anger for everything and anything in turn initiates in her a burgeoning hatred for him and everything he stands for that eventually sees his death (and that of her mother\u2019s) as her only possible salvation: \u2018She imagines the great gust of freedom she\u2019ll feel rushing past her ears on the day when their two deaths \u2013 the one preferably straight after the other \u2013 when their deaths open a door, letting in the light\u2019 (p. 155). When he dies, she will be free, but he will have to die first. Pathetic and weak, the mother is a shadow, and sometimes a malevolent one, whose own fears and neuroses also inflict lasting damage on her daughter.<\/p>\n As we watch Ella grow, her father\u2019s intense psychological abuse is coupled with the reader\u2019s unease that there might be something more physical to the abuse. When Har commands Ella to sit on his lap in her underwear, the reader is given a sickening jolt of this possibility: \u2018\u201cMake your mother jealous,\u201d he says, dragging her onto his knee. \u201cShow your father how good and developed you are\u201d\u2019 (p. 38). The possibility of such abuse is never referred to again, but thus Boehmer adds layer upon layer of complexity and unease to this beautifully crafted, disturbing novel.<\/p>\n One of Ella\u2019s mechanisms for understanding the life into which she has been born is to listen, but rarely to speak. And the best time to listen is at night, when her father, out on the verandah, chain-smoking, and drinking bottle after bottle of \u2018Old Brown Sherry\u2019 with various cronies, recounts details of his life in the Dutch navy during the Second World War. Night after night he talks and talks and Ella, behind the window, listens and absorbs. Her mother, disturbed at finding her continuously out of bed night after night \u2013 and whose other daily anxieties are projected onto Ella \u2013 fears for her daughter\u2019s health. Such lack of sleep cannot be natural in a child. For Ella\u2019s own good a contraption is bought which binds her into her bed at night, strapped in so tightly that she cannot move. Her mother feels happier, knowing that Ella is now asleep in bed, but Ella is not asleep; she is still awake and she soon learns to loosen the straps which bind her until eventually she is to be found once more, roaming the house at night, lurking behind windows, listening. Tranquillisers are prescribed, which make Ella so drowsy she can barely function. The adults in her life \u2013 her parents, the doctor \u2013 tell her this is a good thing, but instinctively, the young girl knows this is wrong and learns to fake swallowing the tablets. In yet another example of how deeply unsettling Boehmer\u2019s narrative is, where security and normality are almost wholly absent from every aspect of Ella\u2019s life, at school, for reasons that are never explained, Ella is placed in a remedial class for misfits. As always, she learns to adapt, to make herself belong in the class, even though she has no idea why she is there. Even a trip back to the Netherlands with her mother to spend time with her relatives is bookended by the sheer horror of the journey. Her mother\u2019s morbid fear of flying is so cleverly detailed by Boehmer, and we see its effect on Ella, who watches \u2013 almost clinically \u2013 her mother\u2019s descent into total hysteria, to the embarrassment of the crew and other passengers.<\/p>\n Once in Holland, her mother gradually regains her composure, and the months spent with her Dutch relatives offer an interlude of normality for Ella, who paints pictures and visits the zoo, where, nevertheless, a haunting image of a swaying polar bear, confined and restrained, offers a bleak reminder of Ella\u2019s true home life. She spends time with her grandmother and her cousins, and for once is not in the enforced semi-isolation of her family, imposed by her irascible father who loathes all his wife\u2019s \u2013 and his own \u2013 Dutch relations, all except the first Ella, of course, but then, she is dead.<\/p>\n The relationship between father and daughter is the moving force of the novel, through which Boehmer cleverly weaves an entire history of the colonisation of South Africa and the injustices of apartheid. Ella is witness to her father\u2019s implacable hatred of progress, of black South Africans, of the government, and politics in general. Her brief relationship with the young black family gardener, Phineas, so poignantly and lightly depicted, speaks volumes for apartheid South Africa in the time the novel is set. The young black teenager is far more cognisant of the ramifications such a relationship would embroil him in than is Ella. Her almost complete lack of understanding of the grim reality of the racist world in which they live only serves to make the situation bleaker. Even nature plays its part in the novel, for Ella\u2019s house is particularly prone to lightning strikes, as if to emphasise the cursed luck of a family for whom nothing ever goes right.<\/p>\n The penny-pinching meanness of Ella\u2019s home life, the cataclysmic awfulness of her situation, is reminiscent of Olive Schreiner\u2019s The Story of an African Farm<\/em>. The absence of hope is only mitigated towards the end by Ella\u2019s scholarship to Canada, and the prospect of escape, though all the while her homeland draws her back. Ella\u2019s inner anger at her situation is expressed in her growing sense of activism, fighting apartheid. She is, in fact, the antithesis of her father, now standing for everything he would have despised. Ultimately, however, there can be no escape for Ella, who finally understands that to return to South Africa and face her demons is her only hope for recovery and resolution.<\/p>\n Mesmerised and haunted, the reader finally puts the book down, blinking back into the light. The journey has been cataclysmic, Ella the protagonist has changed and grown so much, and so, ultimately, have we. No author can deliver an experience more profound than this, Elleke Boehmer\u2019s most powerful, spellbinding novel to date.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fiction Review<\/strong>
\nby Elleke Boehmer
\nDingwall, Scotland: Sandstone Press, 2015
\n273pp, \u00a38.99<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
\nSet in the 1970s, when hardliner B. J. Vorster is Prime Minister of South Africa, Elleke Boehmer\u2019s portrayal of a young girl growing up in a dysfunctional Afrikaans family in the small dormitory town of Braemar, fifty miles inland from Durban, South Africa, is almost Gothic in its disturbing darkness, both physical and metaphorical.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1826,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1386"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2119,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1386\/revisions\/2119"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}