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Apartheid is dead – so who is the enemy?
The Good Doctor
Damon Galgut
2003
Publisher: Atlantic Books
240 pages
Reviewed by Duncan Proudfoot
Cape Town band Bright Blue used to sing a song in the 1980s called "Who is the enemy?" On one live recording, Robin Levetan introduces it by muttering something like, "This one is called 'Who is the enemy?' Actually, that's kind of a redundant question – we know who the enemy is." The enemy at that time, of course, was South Africa's apartheid government; the answer to that question in South Africa today is less clear-cut. Damon Galgut's novel , which was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker prize, is much concerned with friends and enemies.
The novel's narrator, Dr Frank Eloff, is on the run from the emotional wreckage of his life, his wife having gone off with his best friend. He is working in a small and barely functioning hospital in one of South Africa's former homelands. His boss, Dr Ruth Ngema, is waiting for an administrative job in the city which never quite comes, at which point Frank will take over as the administrator of the hospital. Into Frank's life – and into his room, as a roommate – comes a new, young doctor, Laurence Waters. "Behind the words were other words, not spoken. It wasn't just that Laurence Waters and I were doctors; it was that we were two white men, and we belonged in a room together."
Initially, it is Laurence who asserts his friendship to Frank; "I'm your friend" becomes "You're my friend, Frank", while the rest of the staff in the hospital talk to Frank continually of Laurence as his friend. But "friend" is not a straightforward concept for Frank, Mike having been his "friend" until he'd gone off with Frank's wife.
At a critical moment in the novel, when Frank, as a young conscripted doctor in the South African Defence Force, feels himself compelled to adjudge a man fit for further torture, he can state that "the man on the floor is an enemy". "There is a pause, in which I remember who I am, where I am, what is required of me. The man on the floor is an enemy, who will in any case not last the night. It is myself I must look after, so that I don't find myself in his place, naked on my back in a cell, not a doctor any more, a patient for whom there will never be a cure."
There is something at the core of this particular scene which is not convincing. For all that his pos
ition as a doctor and a junior officer puts Frank in a difficult position, there is something bogus about hi s thinking of himself in terms of direct equivalence with the man on the floor. The truth of apartheid and its wars and conflicts is that for all that Frank's options may have been circumscribed in this moral dilemma, he is never, in fact, in quite the same position as the man on the floor. Whatever course of action he had followed he would not have found himself naked on his back in a cell. Therein lay the fundamental difference between being Black and being White. Two mistakes in the twelve Afrikaans words used also detract from the veracity of the scene. The commandant would not have addressed Frank as "lieutenant", but as "luitenant" and the Afrikaans interrogative tag is "nê", rather than "né". Picky perhaps, but such slips don't inspire credibility among many South African readers.
"Is this beleaguered, paranoid obsession with enemies something quintessentially South African, to do with a long history of conflict?"
Much of the central dilemma of "friends" and "enemies" in the book is perhaps summed up in Frank's statement to the Brigadier, the leader of the former homeland, the military officer who'd come to power in a coup, "I don't know what it's like to be you" – a comment that could equally be addressed by any character in the book to any other, an existential issue, in fact. Another neat summation is contained in a description of a local drinking hole, Mama Mthembu's place: "The dirty plastic tables and the sad faces at the bar didn't matter; we were surrounded by voices and movement, the illusion of community." The phrase, "the illusion of community" encapsulates, perhaps, the darker side of the hoped for, and much hyped "rainbow nation", but beyond that, again, something about the world as a whole.
When Frank remembers the assertion he has made to Tehogo, "You are not my enemy, Tehogo", he ponders its implications: "Who was my enemy, then?" At one point, Frank contemplates murdering Laurence, "[b]ecause he was the enemy. I saw it now. The enemy was not outside, at large, in the world; he was within the gates. While I had slept." Is this beleaguered, paranoid obsession with enemies something quintessentially South African, to do with a long history of conflict? Or is it something innate, present everywhere, beyond obvious troublespots?
Frank's take on Laurence meeting Dr Ngema is something of an existential jibe, "He had met the boss now, and a life of duty and meaning would be given to him." But what kind of a boss is it that Laurence has met, and what kind of a world is he in? Is it one in which it is possible to find any duty, any meaning? "Innovation and change: it was one of her key phrases, a mantra she liked to repeat. But it was empty. Ruth Ngema would go to great lengths to avoid any innovation or change, because who knew what might follow on?" Finally though, Dr Ngema, having jumped on the bandwagon of Laurence's innovation of clinics in pursuit of her own ends, makes the following, empty speech, "'Outreach work, community work – it's the kind of thing the previous regime didn't care about. We must all commit ourselves to the new way!" For their own, different reasons, in the face of this hypocritical mouthing of platitudes, Tehogo and Frank are "silent, not applauding, on opposite sides of the room".
Frank echoes a sense of being stuck in a world without change when talking to Laurence about room sharing arrangements, the possibility that Tehogo might move out of his room and that Laurence would no longer have to share with Frank: "'It's possible,' I said. 'It's possible we'll all just stay where we are.'" Not only is the world inhabited by Frank and Laurence seemingly impervious to change, it is also inexplicable. Why had the hospital been painted pink? Frank makes the point early on that no-one knew, and is unable to answer Laurence when he wants to know. Why is the hospital being systematically stripped of fittings, Laurence wants to know. Frank's answer that "there are lots of poor people out there. They can use anything" provokes the following exasperated response from Laurence, "But it's for them. The hospital. It's for them!"
Laurence's frustration at his inability to understand and his desire to change things clashes with Frank's fatalism. When Laurence wants to conduct a clinic in the furthest village, as a symbol, because then it could be done in the closest one as well, Frank is exasperated: "It wasn't enough for him that he had to go where life or fate assigned him. No, he had to grandstand with some big display that meant nothing to anybody except him."
Shortly after Laurence's arrival at the hospital he takes it on himself to mow the unkempt grass, an act viewed with bemusement by others at the hospital. It soon grows back. When Frank and Laurence go walking in the surrounding countryside, Frank notes that "[t]he chaos of the wilderness seemed to oppress him; I think he would have liked to uproot it all and plant lawn there". On the same expedition Frank finds a house, which has been abandoned; Laurence doesn't manage to find a village that perhaps doesn't exist any more. When Frank goes with Zanele, Laurence's American girlfriend, to visit the Brigadier's house up on the hill, they hear, bizarrely, the sound of a lawnmower in the dark, in the garden of the abandoned house. "'Who will cut the grass?", if not for him, is the Brigadier's concern – who would take care of the house he had been forced out of when the rotten edifice of homelands had crumbled into the new democratic, unitary South Africa? Decay, abandonment, the wilderness, tending gardens, but what is being tended? What has decayed?
Laurence's face has a quality which engrosses Frank, "...the quality I'd seen in his face that first day was back again, flickering visibly beneath the skin, almost nameable for a second." Maria too notices this quality, commenting on it to Frank, but unable to define what it is that she sees. Later, when Laurence has performed the abortion on Maria, pregnant most likely by Frank, "...the quality, whatever the quality was, that had given his face its distinction, was gone." Is the quality innocence, then, and Laurence's final disappearance, his probable death, a further loss of innocence?"
When Laurence's girlfriend, Zanele, comes to visit, Laurence is determined to do his duty at the hospital (though Frank would readily swap with him) and asks Frank to spend the evening with her. Frank tells Zanele that Laurence has said that he regrets having missed the army, thinking that it would have been a "formative experience". Frank expands on that in a conversation which goes quickly, and tellingly, wrong.
"'But he's got a point. A year of community service up here isn't going to teach him much. He might've been better off in a shit-hole in the bush. Let him kill people, let people try to kill him. Then we'd see. He wouldn't talk about country clinics and helping the human race any more.'
I was surprised by my own anger, the coldness and clearness of it – though I wasn't sure who it was directed at. We were in a world without nuances now, in which all the subtle gradations of colour had turned into black and white.
She pushed her chair back from the table. 'Don't,' she said. 'Don't talk like that.'
But I was unstoppable by now. 'Why?' Is that too real for you? Ideas are always better than reality, of course. But sooner or later the real world always wins. Laurence will find that out. So will you, when you go back to America and lose your African outfits and your fake name.'
'Fuck you, mister.'
'The feeling is mutual,' I said, as she stood up and stalked out. I sat crunching an ice-cube, reflecting on how quickly it had all gone off the rails. My cold anger went on burning for a while. But it wasn't her I was thinking about; it was Laurence. And I remember that his name, Laurence Waters, seemed suddenly like a combination of blandness and intrigue, banality and piety, that offended me."
The commandant from Frank's time in the army reappears, a colonel now, leading a detachment in the new army, patrolling the border. The world outside impinges on the virtually hermetic world of the hospital. In a remarkably powerful passage, Laurence's past and present fears and his interior and exterior lives collide when he goes looking for Maria at an abandoned army camp. His terrors become real in "a sudden little burst, a flexing of the dark".
This is an exceptional book – powerful, controlled, endlessly and fittingly complex in its exploration of a terrain both intensely personal and political in its broadest sense. It is ever so slightly marred by only one or two false notes, the odd lame expression ("Our mouths locked hotly") and a final line which is bewilderingly off-key given what has gone before, the stuff of school essays: "Which makes me wonder if all of this might have happened differently if I'd never had to share my room." Perhaps Galgut is having a private joke, as with the Chekhov quotation at the beginning of the book: "Hundreds of miles of desolate, monotonous, burnt-up steppe cannot induce such deep depression as one man when he sits and talks, and one does not know when he will go."
Duncan Proudfoot is a South African working in the publishing industry in London.
