My Mother’s Lovers
By Christopher Hope
Grove, 442 pages, $24
Pungent whiffs of “campfires, cordite, pipe tobacco, boot polish and aircraft oil” drift through Christopher Hope’s ninth novel, “My Mother’s Lovers,” an epic look at South Africa, past and present.
The story opens as Alexander Healey, a middle-age salesman of air conditioners, returns from the Far East to execute his late mother’s final wishes. This proves harder than it sounds.
In life, Kathleen was formidable. A pipe-puffing aviator and sharp-eyed hunter, she once boxed three rounds with Ernest Hemingway, yet also found time to knit. She took a legion of lovers, leaving Alexander, her only child, with muddled hints about which of his “uncles” was his father.
A long list of curious legacies keeps Kathleen just as vivid in death. She bequeaths a fright wig once owned by a Liberian boy soldier to a government minister who spent his own youth as an ANC activist. Her many guns go to an apartheid-era police officer now living in “the Nelson Mandela Retirement Village.”
It’s up to Alexander to dispatch these bequests in person. Each beneficiary has a story to tell, conjuring up vivid portraits of Kathleen and the Rainbow Nation, and broadening out to touch on concerns such as the continent’s AIDS crisis and the erratic regime of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe. This is, in short, an exploration of the white man’s dance with sub-Saharan Africa in the 20th Century.
Through his eight previous novels, journalism and stage and radio plays, Johannesburg-born Hope has established himself as one of the region’s sharpest satirists. Here his cast members include a white witch doctor, a mambo-dancing Cuban exile and a tribal leader called Bamadodi the Rain Queen.
Among the most memorable is the recipient of Kathleen’s flying goggles, self- made Cindy September, a “colored” property developer with a son suffering from Down syndrome.
Cindy whisks Alexander off in her pink Porsche to tour Johannesburg, a place with a police record in lieu of a history, as Hope puts it. Almost unrecognizable as the city where Alexander grew up in the 1940s and ’50s, Johannesburg pulses with gaudy, violent energy, its tragicomic extremes captured on newspaper billboards: “Crowds Stone Suspect. Gold Up,” reads one.
Cindy also shows Alexander things about himself and his tangled relationship with his mother. An affair ensues, though it soon falls by the wayside, like much of the novel’s plot. Though this might have made for a meandering read, the sheer force of Hope’s caustic, fondly exasperated vision of South Africa propels “My Mother’s Lovers” onward.
