Nineveh

by Henrietta Rose-Innes

Publisher: Umuzi
Genre: Novel
Verdict: Beautiful, eccentric
Book Reviewed by: Liesl Jobson
Nineveh by Henrietta Rose-Innes

Nineveh, named as one of the top ten books of the year inTthe Star newspaper's Top 100 list, also appeared on Books LIVE top half dozen reads. It’s easy to see why.

This fascinating novel, published by Umuzi, presents the reader with an unusual heroine, Katya Grubbs, pest controller extraordinaire, who casts a gimlet eye upon the city of Cape Town and its inhabitants, animal and insect. She bores into the liminal spaces of society, that shifting terrain where personal trauma meets and marries the emerging ecological protest. As in her Caine Prize-winning short story, Poison, Rose-Innes tackles the subject of so-called town planning, changing ecological realities and the effect of the economy on a range of communities. One has only to think of how sand dune migration compromises some recently developed housing complexes near Sun Rise Beach to realise that fact is stranger than fiction most days, and the theme exposed by this author is not science fiction.

As she goes about her curious work as a pest controller, Katya follows in the footsteps of her father, Len, but with a significant difference. She endeavours, unlike her father, who always stank of chemicals, to do this work humanely. Determined to save the lives of the lowest of the creatures of the earth and set them free in their natural environment, Katya finds herself in a conundrum when she is commissioned to rid a new luxury housing estate of the pests that inhabit the violated wetland on which the building floats. She discovers that the beetles are the least of the problems for the developer who has built on marshy ground. Whether interacting with a society matron or a homeless man, a Congolese security guard or a township entrepreneur, Katya seems to find the weaknesses in their facades, and in her own. Yet this is always done with a seamless inner observer, with the lightest dash – of compassion with goodly servings of wit.

Rose-Innes’ prose is sure and steady with characters that are full-bodied and warm-blooded. The metaphor and message are veiled and subtle in this complex narrative that is simply told.

As the new building goes up across the road from the narrator’s home, cracks form in the walls as the foundations shift and rattle in response to the earth moving equipment. Rose-Innes’s descriptions are spot on, detailed and symbolic, poetic in exactly the right measure. Listen to this for a brief example: “On the bathroom ceiling, she spots a jagged new crack across the plaster. It’s an accusatory shape: of smiting, of lightning bolts. The kind of thing sent from above, in punishment for some clear crime. The kind of thing one calls down upon oneself.”

Nineveh is an exquisite study of the human invocation, drawing heavily on the Biblical city. It explores the relationships we call down upon ourselves and how they play out when trouble strikes. It excavates the constructions we erect that may or may not protect us from our created identities and the realities of connection and banishment that emerge in their wake.

Visitors to Cape Town wanting a memento of the city to take home will do well to put this accomplished tragicomedy in their suitcases. Nineveh is beautiful, eccentric and thoroughly readable

Reviewed for FMR BOOK CHOICE, January 2012 and can be bought online at: www.gorrybowestaylor.co.za
BOOK CHOICE is sponsored by The Bay Bookshop.

Nineveh

by Henrietta Rose-Innes

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