BY ECKARD SMUTS
From time to time a novel comes along that is so strange, yet so utterly fresh and compelling, that it feels tuned into a reality with which you are not yet familiar. Masande Ntshanga’s debut novel The Reactive, which started life as a manuscript written for the University of Cape Town’s creative writing programme, is such a novel.
It is hard to pinpoint what it is about the novel that makes it so compelling. Set in Cape Town in the early 2000s, the story revolves around Nathi (short for Lindanathi), an HIV-positive college graduate who drifts around the city in a chemical haze, inhaling industrial glue with his friends Ruan and Cecilia and selling his prescribed antiretrovirals to infected members of the public. Nathi suffers from a burden of guilt: he feels himself to be complicit in the death of his half-brother, Luthando, who died during his initiation ceremony in the Eastern Cape (Nathi had been supposed to join his brother in the ceremony, but decided at the last minute to remain in Cape Town instead). One day Nathi receives a text message from his uncle, Bhut’Vuyo – Luthando’s stepfather – that reminds him of a promise he had made eight years previously, summoning the spectre of the past into the rootless flow of his present.
From these bare bones of the story, it would be easy to imagine a tale of existential destitution, or a diagnostic finger pointing at the wrongs of society. But in Ntshanga’s hands it becomes a different creature altogether. The world inhabited by Nathi and his friends is marked by a kind of porousness, or a fluidity between certain modes of social and historical determination – sick and healthy, rich and poor, township and city, black and white – that disturbs any easy divisions the reader might make between them. Instead, in fresh, lyrical prose – sentences, as Imraan Coovadia proclaims on the cover blurb, that “swing like nobody else’s” – Ntshanga creates a provocative, yet tender vision of the possibilities for connection amidst the difficult realities of life in contemporary South Africa.
One of the ways in which Ntshanga realizes this fluid state of affairs is by creating a climate of motion for his characters. When Nathi and his friends are not lying comatose in each other’s apartments, they are constantly moving around in taxis: to a party in Long Street, HIV and drug-counselling sessions in Wynberg, meetings with a mysterious, masked stranger in Mowbray and Woodstock, various day-jobs in Muizenberg, Green Point, or the city centre; bars and restaurants in Claremont and Sea Point, the beach at Bloubergstrand, and finally, for Nathi, a long taxi ride to Du Noon, where his uncle Bhut’Vuyo lives in a converted shipping container. The sense one has is of a constant tracing and re-tracing of circuits of movement in Cape Town, a state of diffuse mobility that defies the spirit of segregation which has historically cast its shadow over the city.
This is not to say that Ntshanga ignores the social stratifications of class difference and poverty. Living in the affluent suburb of Westlake, Neil is a heroin addict and a member of the counselling group that Nathi and his friends sporadically attend in order to scout for new customers. Cecilia wishes that Neil would become infected with HIV, so that they could make some money out of him. “Even though he’s a serf in his community, he’s a nobleman in ours,” Nathi reflects. Likewise, when the friends visit an acquaintance of Ruan to buy some weed, and he comes out to meet them wearing silk boxers, Cecilia asks Nathi what he thinks of a guy like that, who “probably has parents who own half of Cape Town”. Nathi merely shrugs and jokes that he might send him a CV. The point is not lost that the friends are aware of themselves as occupants of a less privileged class, but at the same time that it is a distinction which does not hold particular interest for them. The novel focuses instead on bringing to life the fragmented circuitry of their own lives and movements in and around the city.
Ntshanga has a gift for the unusual in his writing. When Nathi enters Observatory during one of his innumerable taxi rides, he glances out of the window, and observes: “[T]he sky looks dull and impenetrable, like the screen of a malfunctioning cellphone. I imagine it made of plastic, each corner suppressing the passage of vital information.” Apart from evoking in the reader a mild and agreeable sense of surprise – the effect, as Robert Louis Stevenson once described the mechanics of literary prose, of posing a semantic knot and then deftly unravelling it – the imagery here is also a subtle reflection on the situation of the protagonist, who feels his Uncle Bhut’Vuyo’s text message pulling at him as if from beyond the opaque limits of the city he has come to know. When the three friend are lying on the beach at Bloubergstrand, smoking joints and eating waffles from Milky Way, Nathi listens to the sea: “the heave of the ocean, when it reaches us, sounds like the breathing of an asthmatic animal”. Time and again, Ntshanga’s prose overturns conventional metaphorical associations, arresting the reader instead with vivid, supple phrases that match the peculiar sense of connection his protagonist has developed with his environment.
All these stylistic niceties, however, would amount to little if they were the point of the novel. What Masande Ntshanga accomplishes with The Reactive is something more profound: he broadens the scope of the familiar, makes visible new dimensions of experience that are slowly beginning to emerge from within the cracks in our discordant societies. It is a thoroughly compelling novel, and Ntshanga’s is a remarkable new voice. If this is the future, then things are not looking too bad for the local literary scene.
The Reactive is published by Umuzi. Read an extract from the novel here, and an interview with Ntshanga here.