A life shaped by romance to a fading man

FICTION: The Shape of Him By Gill Schierhout, Jonathan Cape, 210pp. £16.99

EVERY TWIST OF fate and irony, every turn a life can take –and does – stalks Sara Highbury. The weight of memory burdens her days and her brief experience of happiness settles into a travesty of retribution. South African Gill Schierhout imposes an austere intelligence and sense of regret on this remarkable narrative. If any novel published this year deserves to collect a truckload of honours, it is this one. No reader could be prepared for the complex tale that unfolds. It is a beautiful book, as bleak as love – or whatever it is that passes for love – and as heartbreaking.

As the story begins, Sara is 48 and aware of “this thing called aging happening to other people, but you do not think that it will happen to you and your contemporaries but it has”. She runs a boarding house. Her approach to it, and much else besides it, appears detached, life-weary. Her entire identity has been shaped by the romance she shared with Herbert Wakefield, a diamond digger who slowly began to lose his mind as a brain disease invaded it. He retreats into a hospital, which offers him some element of sanctuary. All she has are her memories and a quiet resolve.

 Structured in fluid waves of memory, her narrative is a form of layered lamentation. Schierhout brilliantly explores the thoughts of a narrator who appears almost mesmerised by the strange horrors to which she becomes privy. And with those horrors comes a humiliation of sorts. Sara is a woman with no expectations and no apparent existence prior to her meeting Wakefield. “When I think of Herbert now, he seems to me to be more closely related to a stick insect than to a man. He seemed barely human, barely fertile.”

 Her thoughts are precise yet often suggest a state of shock; she has been numbed by all that happened. Most interestingly, aside from a talent for sewing, she never reveals anything about her own history. Instead she is both witness and victim. “And I dared not ask myself why I had fallen for a man like this. Even a snail across a rock leaves a trail; not Herbert Wakefield, there was nothing about his life you could follow.” As if she is giving evidence, she attempts to recall the early signs of his illness and admits to noticing little. “It was not the unsteadiness on his feet that bothered me, nor his anger, unpredictable like the gases underground ready to explode. No, it was the holes in his memory that I first became aware of. Herbert could not hide these, however delicately he squirmed.” ….

 Herbert’s plight unfolds through a series of dramatic set-pieces, culminating in a finale that is as symbolic as it is dark. The prose is both abrupt and curiously elegant; the narrator conveys the pain she has suffered as well as the resignation she acquired along the way. In a very human account of lives faltering into upheaval, Schierhout has unpicked conventional narrative and created something special from a maze of experiences involving a small group of individuals.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2009/0606/1224248149411.html

Written with an elliptical elegance reminiscent of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, this is a strong debut about the grip of memory and the power of one life to impose itself upon another

In Gill Schierhout’s The Shape of Him (Jonathan Cape, £16.99), South Africa’s mining country represents both a threat and the promise of freedom. For Schierhout’s characters happiness is as rare and precious as the gems beneath the veldt. Stricken by a degenerative brain disease, diamond digger Herbert Wakeford has spent his last years in a remote mental institution. On the eve of his funeral in 1945, his former lover Sara, the manager of a Cape Town boarding house, recalls their life together. What makes this novel so disarming is the figure of Herbert. A cipher whose personality is further eaten away by illness, his immense absence exerts irresistible gravitational force on both the flinty Sarah and Aloma Maggie, Herbert’s daughter by another woman. Written with an elliptical elegance reminiscent of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, this is a strong debut about the grip of memory and the power of one life to impose itself upon another.

Her novel is not unlike the diamonds of which she writes: hard, glinting and multi-faceted

Gill Schierhout’s narrator, Sara Highbury, is an austere woman, disconcerted by her own thin-lipped face in the mirror and sometimes missing active unkindness only by a hair’s breadth.  But for her time and place – South Africa in the first half of the 20th Century – she is a passionate and unconventional woman, willing to embark on an affair with a married man in the wake of the real love of her life.  That love is for a man with whom she once went prospecting for diamonds, who is now incarcerated in an asylum and suffering from a degenerative brain disease. On a visit to Sara, he confesses that he has a daughter with another woman but, as so  often happens, things are not what they seem.  A trail has been laid of lies and betrayal and, in following it, Schierhout gives an unsentimental but moving account of mortal illness and love.  Her novel is not unlike the diamonds of which she writes: hard, glinting and multi-faceted, suggestive of intense compression and unfathomable depths. 

A haunting literary engagement

The Shape of Him Gill Schierhout Jonathan Cape, $34.95 SARA Highbury meets Herbert Wakeford in a South African diamond mining town in the early 20th century. They fall in love and live together for years, but the affair fades. Herbert's mind begins to fade, too. He is diagnosed with a degenerative brain disease that slowly drives him mad. Long after Sara has started a new life as a governess at a Cape Town boarding house, a desperate woman arrives with a child she claims is Herbert's. Much of the novel is related by Sara through a lens of intelligent and slightly prim wistfulness, and the depth of her characterisation is one of the book's charms. As she nurses the dying Herbert, the past they once shared yields its secrets. Gill Schierhout's The Shape of Him is an evocative yet austere novel, the prose pruned back almost too far. Yet the author's effortless sense of drama and taut recreation of the period make this a haunting literary engagement.

Some Other mentions

• Selected as one of the reviewer’s Top 25 works of fiction in the year of publication in Destined for a Lengthy Shelf Life

• ‘There is an unnerving intelligence and sensitivity in this South African debut…’ (Irish Times)

• ‘Every so often a story comes along that stands out as truly original.  The Shape of Him is one such story.  And in a world where it seems that everything has been done at least once before, it’s a refreshingly unique 200 page read…’ (The Citizen)

• ‘A subtle and multi-level novel, carefully structured in in excellent, sensitive prose. One looks forward to Schierhout's next work.’ (Rapport, Transl.).