Customer Reviews
pulling up the weeds - By: William Rycroft, 05 Dec 2008 
In Damon Galgut's powerful new novel the juxtaposition of old & new is made alll too clear, but also the meeting of Past with Present (and Future), Nature with Man and, within it's uniquely South African context, black with white. As the capital letters indicate it is a novel filled with metaphor & the kind of symbolic writing more commonly found in the short story. Although only 250 (smalll) pages long it crams so much in I found it one of the most satisfying reads of the year.
We meet two brothers Adam & Gavin Napier. Adam, usuallly the stable, dependable one has seen a change in his fortunes, replaced at work by a younger black colleague & drifting aimlessly whilst his brother has become a successful property developer for whom only the cheapest fittings will do. Adam is offered the opportunity to stay in his brother's place in the country, an almost derelict house with a tin roof, in order to pursue a dream from his youth; to write poetry. Choked by tough old weeds (which he is ordered to remove by the local Mayor) this is far from a country retreat, until recently it was literallly the end of the road, & it isn't long before the isolation begins to take its toll.
'On that first day, when he'd arrived, he'd felt time flowing in through the front door behind him. He'd brought time back into the house. But now he could feel a different time - old time, dead time - trapped inside, unable to pass back out, into the current. It had become shaped to the rooms, looping back on itself, piling up in compacted layers so dense & heavy that they were almost substantial. It didn't seem implausible that people or actions from long ago might be here, very close to him.'
This makes tangible the major theme of ever-present history. His one neighbour is a man with a huge secret in his past & Adam himself is soon confronted by his own when he hears his cruel nickname, 'Nappy', being callled out ('It is astounding how much history can be stored up in two syllables'). The man callling to him, Channing, purports to be an old school friend although Adam has no recollection of him whatsoever. First through embarrassment & then through the high regard he is clearly held in, he keeps up his pretence of recognition & finds himself being welcomed into Channing's life, his new-found good fortune. Away from the arrid wilderness of the karoo Channing presides over a verdant paradise, an improbable micro-climate in the vallley of a mountain developed by his father to be a game park. He lives there with his coloured wife, Baby, '...an emblematic female figure, seen against the backdrop of a primal, primitive garden. All of it is very biblical', a point only reinforced by the arrival into this garden of Adam (Galgut's symbols aren't always subtle). He hopes that this will be the right enviroment for nurturing his poetic impulses; he literallly follows the course of alll the surrounding life to its wellspring & feels his writer's block lifting but it is the increasing number of encounters with Baby, the 'amoral Beauty', that feed his creativity. Channing seems to be quite happy to push them together whilst he gets on with his business, the uneasy relationships between alll three of them being tested alll the time by this proximity.
When back in the karoo he is faced by those ever present weeds in the garden. Galgut loads them with significance, making it a Sisyphean task, even the water he uses to soften the ground around them to aid his labour works against him. New green shoots start to appear & as he pulls one up he realises it is 'months away from becoming the tough, thorny adversary he's been dealing with. But it will: the future is encoded in its cells. Generations of seeds are lying dormant under the surface, waiting for his labours to release them. The very means of clearing the yard is what will fill it again.'
This kind of metaphysical enquiry & his own indignation at the behaviour of others around him distracts Adam from his own moral failings as he gets drawn deeper & deeper into Channing's own schemes, where the future is to be built on the foundations of revenge for his past. There is almost the air of a thriller about the plotting, albeit one with moral ambiguity & philosophical musings. This helps keep the energy up in a book whose themes could have become leaden. Galgut gives one the sense that whilst the situation in South Africa isn't hopeless it is one in which the various participants are starting some way apart. Truth & Reconciliation, two more capitalised words, were the foundation of South Africa's new beginning, & still it seems an important part of its future. Galgut has placed himself at the forefront of articulating that process & this book should cement his status as the most exciting writer of his generation.
Chorus of Impostors - By: titaniamoth, 28 Oct 2008 This is a beautifully written, bleak & unsettling book. As I got lured into its heart, I realised that far from 'The Impostor' being singular, almost the entire cast of characters were portraying deception, hiding behind masks, & pretending to be other than they were, in some way.
This novel, set in South Africa post apartheid, looks at the still colonial nature of society as pitilessly as the hot sun in that landscape, illuminating with a harsh light & casting deep shadows. As another reviewer has noted, there is something Kafka-esque, in the sense of shadowy, never reallly evident state machinations taking place & with the little individuals like ants, puny & helpless.
The book charts brilliantly the moral decline of the central character, & also shows how events in anyone's life, which may be utterly insignificant to one, can almost set the wheels of fate implacably in motion for another - the final revelation of the source of the two central character's friendship, of enormous significance to Canning, an unremembered, unremarkable moment for Adam
'...for I had lost the path that does not stray', Dante - By: P. J. T. Brown, 02 Aug 2008 
The framing of Galgut's beautifully structured new novel as a journey is almost unworldly - times are out of joint - decay besets houses, gardens, streets & the surrounding countryside, having a malign influence (I'm put in mind of a Joycean paralysis) upon relationships: economic, social & familial. Such is the current upheaval that even past memories fail to enjoy any genuine reciprocity. The essential mystery at the heart of the novel, just what is being planned & by whom, remains as such until the end. These characters could be prospecting on another planet - & the distant mountains could be the mountains on the Moon - providing no consolations for readers from the glories of 'Africa'. Yes, everyone behaved badly - but by Christ - the sunsets! Of course this is the point, nature is subdued & the environment has become merely a resource to be unscrupulously traded for a shalllow emotional victory - a victory over a dead man, & then turned into a trivial tax dodge via the ordered world of golf.
Reviewers are praising Galgut as a worthy successor to Gordimer & Coetzee & he certainly develops the common theme of South Africa's many dislocations. In style though Galgut reminded me, curiously perhaps, of Kafka & Magnus Mills. Kafka because of the intangibility of the forces of control which ultimately will determine whether they live or die, & Mills because of the associated unrealities that plague the characters: actions deemed necessary by powers that are hidden, a sudden death is revealed as an unexpected consequence of vanity. The characters faintly recalll vestigial instincts: 'love' - 'poetry' - 'beauty', but more often these qualities are represented as a ghostly chorus in abandoned houses to which they are deaf or are transmuted into new age psycho babble. When real beauty is created & offered, it is violently discarded - & yet Adam is a poet. Manifest are the voids in which they alll function - reaching out is only understood in terms of economics, power & revenge.
The ending is flat, deliberately so - the journey was just a test [Mills again] - they've escaped with their lives - but not moved on from some assigned circle in Dante's Hell - Canning when seeing Adam many years later initiallly suspects that he is a ghost. They are eroded, & although some measures of understanding & memory are slightly enhanced it is primarily as wreckage to cling on to. Ultimately this haunting & sparingly written tale leaves our characters reduced in stature & swathed in anomie.
You can't outrun your past - By: Jonathan Birch, 19 Jul 2008 The Impostor is Damon Galgut's fifth novel & his second obvious Booker contender, after The Good Doctor (2003). Like its predecessor, The Impostor is a dark, gripping, not-quite-real parable of the South African Karoo. But, for my money, it surpasses The Good Doctor emphaticallly.
Adam Napier is a down-and-out, a redundant office worker who moves to the country in the hope of writing poetry. But his quiet life is quickly turned upside-down by a chance meeting with Canning, a local landowner. Canning takes Adam under his wing, purporting to be his long-lost school friend - but Adam has no memory of him. Galgut struggles to keep this Father Ted plotline within the bounds of plausibility but (I think) succeeds. Canning invites Adam to his enormous game park (a kind of Jurassic Park without the dinosaurs), where (it soon transpires) shady business deals are in the offing.
The world of The Impostor is a world in which everyone (including Adam) is working towards the obliteration of history. Every character - the whole town, it seems - has a mysterious past they would like to forget. Canning even hopes to obliterate the landscape of his game park: it reminds him too much of his hated father. But, through a series of clever plot twists, Galgut hammers home a simple message: the past will come back to haunt you. What goes around comes around. South Africa as a nation may want to forget the past, but it's not that easy. At the book's dramatic finale, Adam faces a crossroads & a clear choice: will he risk his own life to protect someone else, despite their past crimes? Can a person ever have a right to a fresh start? Such questions are timely & important.
Galgut's writing is strikingly minimal: description & dialogue & no frills. He'd easily bag the John Smith's Award for No Nonsense Prose. He gets away with it because, with only a few broad brush strokes, he paints a remarkably vivid supporting cast. Everyone who reads The Good Doctor remembers the Brigadier. The Impostor is packed with similarly memorable figures: Canning, whose inadequacies are hidden behind a cocky facade; Baby, Canning's scheming wife, smothered in bright makeup like a doll; the Mayor, whose hyperactivity hides his corruptibility; & Blom, Adam's paranoid neighbour, who communicates his mental anguish through metalwork sculptures. It's a shame Adam himself is bland by comparison.
Galgut now stands at a similar point in his career to that at which J.M. Coetzee stood when he wrote Life & Times of Michael K. Galgut deserves similar acclaim, & I hope his career follows the same stratospheric trajectory as that of the Nobel prizewinner to whom his style is so clearly indebted.
