Sven Axelrad, elbows dangling and fingers fidgeting, appears slightly nervous at the size of the crowd at the Franschhoek Literary Festival session. Humbled, too: “I’m just a tampon accountant,” he mutters, referencing his day job.
But his new book, The Nicotine Gospel, is his third novel in rapid succession; he’s either not very busy at the Durban-based multinational where he works, or — more likely — he is transforming into a serious, committed writer.
His first two books, Buried Treasure and God’s Pocket, deserved their wide acclaim. Stylistically, they felt similar, the latter an extension of the first book’s idea, both fusions of fantasy and philosophy, illuminated with wordplay and wide-ranging literary references. The novels had complex, multiple plot strains, provoking thought on themes big and small — but they were fun to read, too.
A fresh feather in Axelrad’s cap is that The Nicotine Gospel is markedly different.
The story’s central plot is simple, starting with a freakish lightning strike that kills the mother of two young boys, six-year-old Nathan and three-year-old Danny, in 1987. Nathan, the first-person narrator, shifts forwards and backwards over the next 27 years. The boys’ father, a moderately well-known writer named Esben Muesli, descends into a form of depression. He copes with the devastation of losing his wife by veering into eccentricity. Now, he can navigate the world only through the prism of what becomes his personal gospel: brands of cigarettes, their smoke, and the rituals surrounding the habit. Their father loves them, but largely absents himself from the boys’ wellbeing and upbringing — except to teach them his Nicotine Gospel.
This starts with his insistence that, given his brand, they are the Lucky Boys, a sad irony in light of what befell their wife and mother. Their father takes them on regular field trips to a petrol station to observe people buying cigarettes. Based on brand choice he identifies their personalities and characteristics. Some of the book’s best lines are tied to the behaviours and idiosyncrasies he highlights. Pall Mall “tends to be popular with bikers, poets and short- to midterm inmates”, he affirms, informing his preschoolers that “Vonnegut said smoking Pall Malls was a classy way to commit suicide”. He is scathing of people who choose flavoured filters, saying they are sacrificing their pride. “Life, like tobacco and coffee, should be concentrate,” he tells them.
Interestingly, Axelrad is not a smoker, though he did take up the habit very briefly to do the necessary research for the novel. To flesh out the imaginary gospel, “I bought every single brand of cigarettes, and I smoked them furiously,” he says to audience laughter. I picture a thick smoke cloud above his head, mirroring a line from the book: “I was trying to understand my father by breathing in his smoke,” says the very young Nathan.
The novel’s cover image captures this kind of innocent childhood moment. It is wistful, perhaps because of its universality, a reminder of our fleeting purity of being, receding as we get older. The image sucks readers in, increasingly so as the story progresses. The book’s upfront dedication — straightforwardly, “To my brother” — means it is not a spoiler to say that the photograph is of Axelrad and his sibling as very small children; the narrator is Axelrad-as-Nathan, and, when putting the book down and glimpsing the cover, readers may wonder about his and his brother’s real-life childhood happiness.
More so in light of a plot line that develops when Nathan’s father takes a new partner. She is described faithfully as if through the lens of a young child, so her age is vague and her appearance is portrayed in alignment with her behaviour towards the boys. So she is Margot Merlot; most of what we need to know about her is that the wine flows in proportion to the blood she draws from, and the bruises she inflicts on, the children. Towards the end of the story, pondering the five worst things he has seen in his life, 30-year-old Nathan confirms he would rather never have seen her at all, but he chooses to remember her rare smiles and kindnesses. “I hate those moments the most because they prove she was capable of them,” he says. Forgiveness is the book’s overriding theme, and it flows even to her.
At the festival, I think the discussant confuses this with redemption. More or less according to parts of The Nicotine Gospel, Axelrad and his brother were abused as children; his parents were not at fault, rather their subsequent respective partners were. He wants the novel to be contextualised as “a story I needed to tell”, he says, but the release of feelings is not accusatory.
Besides, redemption would be an act from father to sons. Axelrad writes in the book’s acknowledgments that his father encouraged him to write it. In the novel itself moths regularly appear, flitting voluminously around Esben’s head. According to Buddhist belief, they represent ignorance of danger. But they also symbolise the spirit world — messages from his deceased wife, perhaps — and transformation. The boys’ father, finally, grasps what is happening to his children and takes some form of redemptive action.
Decades later, Nathan goes to therapy to try to make sense of what happened in his childhood. He wants to understand not just his father, but his brother too. Tragedy, then fear, bonded them tightly as children, but they drifted apart, the occasional reunion in their 20s triggered by Dan’s misadventures — feats of outrageous adrenaline-seeking that Nathan grasps as probable suicide attempts. It’s not a non sequitur when, bantering about the concept of God, Danny tells him that there is no collective noun for men. “We are a loneliness of men,” Nathan responds.
Framed this way, The Nicotine Gospel is a social commentary on our times, a confrontation of deep-rooted ills, some of which are barely whispered.
Axelrad confirms that he has recently entered therapy, and the festival audience is hushed, moved by much of the conversation. But to frame his book as joyless, or to capture him as beset by troubles, would be entirely incorrect. His novels celebrate the journey of life, including the struggles. “If you fight for something, and you get it after [say] 10 years, it’s truly yours,” he believes.
And his gentle humour is uplifting. When a fellow panellist mentions his atheism, quick as a flash, Axelrad asks, “Ah, but could you believe in The Nicotine Gospel?”
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