The Rights of Desire.(Review)

The Rights of Desire, by Andre Brink; Secker & Warburg, 2000, $47.27.

WE ARE USED to the idea of heavyweight American novelists indulging in the occasional bout of literary biffo. Some years ago pugnacious Norman Mailer famously came to blows with the similarly combative Gore Vidal. The two writers slugged it out in a drunken fistfight that took place in a New York restaurant, though naturally their recollections of the altercation differ. More recently, Mailer joined with John Updike and John Irving to give Tom Wolfe a hammering over his novel A Man in Full, fortunately on this occasion only in print.

South African writing is seeing an eruption of an altogether more dignified and fruitful kind, with Andre Brink contesting the territory covered by J.M. Coetzee in the latter's massively successful 1999 novel Disgrace. Brink, whose long list of titles includes The Ambassador and A Dry White Season, has written a novel that responds directly to his peer's work, in both form and content. In The Rights of Desire Brink presents a consanguineous yet contrasting approach to the question of how a novel about South Africa should be written.

Brink's title is taken from the speech made by Coetzee's disgraced middle-aged academic David Lurie: "I rest my case on the rights of desire ... On the god who makes even the small birds quiver." Lurie's decision to quit his boring but secure academic post on a questionable point of principle after seducing one of his female students, leads to a brutal initiation into the endemic violence that is a feature of post-apartheid South Africa. The pack rape of his daughter--an attack during which he is beaten unconscious--and his own inability to influence subsequent events lead to the realisation that life for him will now be perilous and uncertain.

While acknowledging in interviews his "awe" at Coetzee's achievement, Brink has also admitted to having "some problems" with his colleague's approach. From this distance, these problems seem more aesthetic than political. Both writers have sound liberal credentials, with Brink the more overtly radical of the two during the apartheid era. Brink and Coetzee both show that South Africa is no longer a place where whites may feel at ease, but each portrays the current situation in a different way.

Brink, like Coetzee, holds a literature professorship at the University of Cape Town, an institution situated in the region where the action of both The Rights of Desire and Disgrace takes place. Each of the protagonists has to reconcile his refined tastes with the harsh reality that a man of his race, education and age is no longer privileged and is indeed rapidly becoming redundant. Books and music and all the other trappings of Western civilisation are of no practical value; mere survival increasingly becomes the major preoccupation. For the first time in their lives the characters must deal with the collective guilt of the past and the horrors of the present. Each novel features the rape or attempted rape of a white women by a group of black men.

Brink's protagonist Rueben Olivier is a university librarian who has been forcibly retired to make way for a less qualified black replacement. He is left to live alone in a rambling old house haunted by the ghost of a slave woman who led a rebellion against her captors.