Vivid characters enliven a frontier tale

On the face of it, we have had enough writing on colonisation from the perspective of the coloniser, on the hardship, the pioneering spirit, the ignorance and the failures. It wouldn’t be remiss for aspirant writers to be politely dissuaded by creative writing departments from tackling yet another 1820 settler examination.

But then there is Claire Robertson. Hearing about her latest novel, The Immortalites, on a young woman’s tribulations in the 1830’s Eastern Cape, and despite being a committed fan of her writing, my first reaction was: is this the one I’m going to skip? Is this one too many historical novels in her oeuvre? The cover, a painting of aloes on a ridge in an old “empty land” academic style, didn’t help.

Well, I am glad I didn’t. Yes, it is a well-trodden subject, but Robertson is like an explorer hacking away at tedious vegetation until you find she has fashioned a kind of reverse sculpture, a mould filled with vivacious writing and fresh thinking that gives pregnant volume to old forests of desultory facts. Her trademark multitasking long sentences are there, but they read much easier than those of her previous novel, Isle, and she mixes them with shorter ones. It all works like a charm; I know few other writers whose paragraphs can be little worlds of their own.

Twenty-four-year-old Ellen Kent is put on a ship, the Immortalite, to the Eastern Cape to serve as what a newly settled English family considers to be a governess. She is molested and then tagged as a wanton, making her a bit of a stock figure, a naif that allows the writer to present historical happenings through a filter of plausible ignorance, and so sidestep the pitfalls of factual accuracy.

Robertson walks this tightrope with admirable panache, giving Ellen just enough of an independent and sharp mind to allow for utterly convincing descriptions and affecting ponderings in a Georgian English that have the makings of an evolving personal philosophy. She is “a sorting sort of woman with a sorting sort of mind” and soon gets put to work sorting things. There are hints here and there of a modern liberal sensibility’s preoccupations being grafted on to the novel, but liberal thinking is probably as old as humanity or else we wouldn’t be here, so it does not feel out of place.

Robertson chances her arm by adding a fantastical character, a large songstress called Elsie Divine, who Ellen and her custodian (“keeper”) discover when he appears to win a horse and cart in a gambling game. In an interview with Sue-Grant Marshall, the writer called her an “abundant woman, an Aphrodite who has lost her way”, and pulls this off too, even if Elsie has a few traits bordering on the magical.

The custodian, Captain Makepeace, is another stock figure, the greedy merchant who can only think of money. But the writer imbues him with vivid realism too as he bumbles from one failed enterprise to the next, turning him into a fascinating study of the psychology behind the time’s nascent mercantile capitalism.

These two characters introduce an understated comicality to the novel that culminates in a somewhat unlikely escapade between a dog and a naked man. I didn’t buy it, but by that time I was so drawn into the whole messy yet evocative expedition that I was prepared to put it down to being the novel’s “beauty spot”.

The Immortalites is a war novel of a kind, as Ellen finds herself thrown into the Frontier Wars, the participants in which and currents of which she needs to understand, and fast, to make the right decisions for her survival. The atrocities start with the humiliation of the Xhosa sovereign Maqoma on a beach by the British military commander Harry Smith. Real historical episodes are recounted through Ellen’s eyes, culminating in descriptions of the aftermath of the murder of a member of Robertson’s own family line, the 11-year-old Lizzie Shone.

The worth of novels such as these lies in their illumination of the roots of customs and institutions, and the injustices, of our own times. Robertson goes further with The Immortalites — perhaps giving a certain heft to the title — by also venturing how resistance to these might have germinated. In the Grant-Marshall interview she spoke about adding how women experienced the frontier to how the frontier experienced women.

In her abundance, Elsie, as a resurrected stone-age Aphrodite, is already a statement against womanly ideals being imposed by colonialist men. When she is commandeered to sing to Xhosa dignitaries, she erupts screeching like a harpy, the mythical half-woman, half-bird, and settles into a lullaby. The military see this as a display of weakness, humiliating them, but afterwards a Xhosa royal comes to pay her respects to Elsie.

Not to spoil the story, but Robertson also most interestingly grapples, in quite a novel way, through Ellen’s own on-the-spot mind work, with racism. The way she thinks through “categories” is but one of many instances that might warrant a master’s or doctoral thesis teasing out the author’s philosophy.

Likewise, the character Gys de Boer, who acts as translator to the British military. Most of the names carry stereotypical elements, and so one is tempted to see this choice of name as commentary or at least a gesture to our current difficulties with the Kill the Boer song. Against type, Robertson makes him an intelligent man with sophisticated tastes, out of sorts with the belligerence of the British soldiers, and one may read him as another of the marginals on which a common future would be built nearly two centuries later.

Perhaps the most arresting part of the book is the afterword, in which this sensuous story is yanked back to present times by Robertson’s notes on its provenance.

The Immortalites is a wonderful novel, it’s as simple as that. I don’t know if Robertson is an underrated writer, perhaps it’s rather the case that all South African novelists are underrated. Here’s hoping, though, that her publisher and agent do their best and then some to get her on the lists of international prizes. She deserves to be read much more widely.