A great white hunter, and her son

By Richard Eder  |  August 19, 2007

My Mother's Lovers
By Christopher Hope
Grove, 442 pp., $24

Christopher Hope has drawn upon several near-legends to construct his novel's larger-than-life African adventuress. Kathleen Healey is a small-plane jungle pilot, big-game hunter, prolific lover, three-round boxing partner with Ernest Hemingway, drop-by aerial buddy of Albert Schweitzer, and all-around free spirit.

Not for strict parallels but for her transgressive boundary jumping, we seem to catch glimpses of Beryl Markham, Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), and -- what with the resemblance in the book's jacket picture -- Katharine Hepburn fulminating her way down a mud-choked African river.

Larger than life isn't life, of course; and Hope, a South African novelist (author of "Kruger's Alp"), does not so much personify Kathleen as perform her. "My Mother's Lovers" is told by her son Alexander in the form of a memoir, but both he and his mother are made up. They lack the jolt of astonishing things actually happening.

The author, speaking through his alter-ego narrator, expounds despairingly on the disaster imposed by South Africa's old white-supremacist Afrikaner leadership, and a different disaster evolving under the new black political class. As for Kathleen and Alexander, they represent in different ways the irrelevance of a white outsider minority, largely of British lineage, standing a little removed from the struggle.

The mother, 6 foot 2 with a mannish gait and a captious femininity, represents the old adventurer generation of explorers, conquerors, freebooters, and hunters for whom Africa was a fantasy of prowess. Hope puts it well: "We wrote our names on mountains and rivers, talked ourselves up; in fact, did absolutely anything to keep away the feeling that we were lost in a place that did not hate us, but simply did not notice," Alexander says. "We called it mastery. Worse, we even called it love."

Kathleen, flying everywhere on impulse in the prewar days before the colonies became nations, lived out the old freewheeling urge. She brought pygmies home as pets; also a youth from the leopard sect with razor shards attached to his fingernails. Her succession of lovers included a Greek smuggler and an Afrikaner police torturer.

She revered the original Boer leaders who fought the British, but despised the postwar designers and enforcers of apartheid. It was a matter of style more than politics; in her old age she used her hunting flights as cover to smuggle out members of the valiant black resistance, and could never come to terms with the government it formed after it won.

Alexander, estranged from both sides, was estranged as well from his mother's anachronistic adventuring. His two marriages foundered on her; the first, to a starchy society woman who was scandalized by Kathleen's wild eccentricity; the second, to a radical activist who loathed her hunting.

Alienated all around, he chooses disembodiment, making his career, as he puts it, in "air." He travels around Southeast Asia, that is, selling ventilation and air-conditioning systems.

It is only after Kathleen's death that he comes back and, in the book's most interesting section, takes bleak account of the South African world, old and new, and of his own passive and tenuous place in it. Briefly, he disposes of the apartheid state, calling it not a country but "a demented gang." His portrait of the post-apartheid era is less violent but grimmer.

Alexander tells of Koosie, a black playmate, poetic and funny, who joined the underground and emerged as a high government official with a humorless, unquestioning allegiance to his party.

The allegiance extends to his refusal, after contracting AIDS, to take retroviral drugs, following the party line that declares it not a virus but a syndrome of a variety of agents, and the retrovirals a sinister invention of big pharma. Alexander visits his dying friend faithfully and with bitterness, denouncing what he calls "death by ideology."

Koosie is used to symbolize one aspect of today's South Africa; another is embodied by Alexander's lover, Cindy. A beautiful Cape Colored woman, wealthy from a settlement from her divorced banker husband, she is one of the new rich, living in a style whose spectacular flamboyance is subject to heavily guarded routines against the street violence of the past couple of decades. Her exultant mastery of this febrile existence is shattered when her little boy is shot dead in a hijacking. She crumples, retreating into a fantasy of Alexander's white-hunter mother, wearing her clothes, smoking her pipes, learning to fly.

Hope's three figures -- the political idealist dead of AIDS, the gilded high-liver turning back to a long-dead romanticism, and the narrator, alien and aloof -- weave a despairing vision. Whether or not the vision is excessively swollen, the novel that wields it and the characters who play it out are instances of fictional hypertrophy.

Richard Eder reviews books for several publications.