I received a book for Christmas from a retired English lecturer. I admire her, tremendously, for many reasons more especially for her personal library collection consisting of more than a thousand books. The week before Christmas last, she pressed an orange-covered paperback into my hand, wished me a happy festive season and announced that she was off for the upcoming holidays.
My Christmas book gift was The Ambassador by the late South African author, Andre P. Brink (1935 - 2015). It was first published in the United Kingdom in 1967, at the height of the pulp fiction era, when Brink was in his early thirties. He wrote in his author's note that ''The Ambassador was the result of my first prolonged exposure to Paris as a student (1959 - 1961)...'' but, what struck me and piqued my interest was the book's dedication, three words floating in the centre of a yellowed pulp page, ''In memoriam, Ingrid''.*
The Ambassador's plot is simple and the primary settings for the main plot events are an ambassadorial residence and a dingy flat in a seedy part of Paris, in the sixties of the previous century. The ambitious, young Third Secretary at the South African embassy in France, Stephen Keyter, had decided to report the ambassador, Paul van Heerden, a married man, father and career diplomat, to the line ministry in Pretoria for ''unbecoming conduct'' with a woman of questionable morals. The woman in question is an immigrant Parisienne, Nicolette Alford, also originally from South Africa.
Keyter's decision is an act of vindictiveness, executed in typical bureaucratic fashion, the processes and procedures of which are vividly detailed in the book by Brink to impress upon the reader the importance of the observation of protocol, at all times, including rank and file, that govern the relationship between the ambassador, Van Heerden, and his Third Secretary, Keyter.
The point of contention between the younger man and his senior is Nicolette. Keyter had met her at the embassy and decided to pursue her, only to be rejected on numerous occasions, subjected to lies, evasions and often, treated with indifference. Instead of resigning himself to the nature of the dysfunctional relationship he appears to have with her, or even, walking away from the constant frustration she seems to cause him, Keyter becomes obsessed with her. His obsession turns into hatred when he discovers that Nicolette is having an affair with the ambassador, Van Heerden.
Van Heerden appears to be the only well-rounded character in the book and for me, reads intensely personal, almost as if Brink had based the character on himself and his troubled relationship with the poet, Ingrid Jonker. The references to Jonker are frequent and obvious. For example, as a young man in Cape Town, Van Heerden had met, on a stormy, windy night, a dark-haired young woman who desperately wanted ''to be free''. Ingrid Jonker had been slight of build and dark-haired. The young woman Van Heerden had met represented everything he was not and had challenged all his carefully constructed illusions about himself. In Brink's book, her name is given as Gillian but he may just as well have used her real name, Ingrid. Van Heerden's affair with Nicolette, who is physically dissimilar to but reminds him of Gillian (Ingrid, in other words) in lifestyle and spirit, is therefore a manifestation of his attraction to chaos, anarchy and an expression of his yearning for ''freedom''. Interestingly, the ambassador considers his tryst with Gillian one of the only, and few, ''mistakes'' in his otherwise orderly life.
The carefully observed protocols within the stately embassy disintegrate against the background of daily news reports from South Africa about civil unrest, a looming mineworkers' strike, swelling opposition against the South African government from ''Afro-Asian'' countries at the United Nations, and surprisingly, the successful conclusion of an arms deal with the French government. Juxtaposed with the ambassador's hitherto neat and tidy life consisting of diplomatic meetings and events accompanied by his well-behaved, poised wife who drinks too much, and a perfect daughter, is a pulsating Paris, beautiful and ugly at the same time, with its culture, cuisine and clochards, and struggling in its seedy bowels, a young female emigre eking out a living in a strip club.
The story is narrated from three first-person perspectives; the Third Secretary, Keyter, the Ambassador, Van Heerden, and Nicolette, and an omnipresent third-person narrator. The storyline construction is overall very good, the plot simple, some have said predictable, and the events chronological. Nicolette makes a surprising revelation which turns Keyter's romantic ordeal and the book's conclusion into miserable poignancy. I was left with a longing to see and breathe Brink's Paris and a sad nostalgia of sorts at the conclusion of the book for having knowledge of a time in a place I can never fully know.
What I liked most about Brink's story was his creativity in using for a rather pedestrian plot, that is, a younger man's unrequited love, an ageing diplomat's midlife crisis and sordid affair with a younger woman, who had ostensibly fled the very society that produced men such as Van Heerden and Keyter, an embassy as the setting in what is arguably the most romanticised European city, Paris. Brink's Paris (''bon Paree'') has all the anticipated main attractions plus beggars, poverty, infidelity, heartbreak, suicide and prostitutes. The city is glamorous and exciting, filthy and repulsive, also.
The novel has several eye-scratching flaws, though. It was one of Brink's earlier works. I was very much interested and intrigued by the positioning of his characters along his story-line to see how they well they interact and discovered that they are vehicles to tell the story more than they are relatable. It is, for example, very hard to empathise with any of the main or minor characters, including Nicolette. Even though the events in the story flow naturally and are well constructed, the dialogue between the characters is difficult, unnatural and superficial. There are several typos in the pulp edition I now have in my personal library. Against the backdrop of dramatic real world events in the late sixties and the rising objection to Apartheid, which, in other words, formed the proverbial ''bigger picture'', Brink had decided to write a small, personal story that would have been entirely insignificant had it not been for a three-word dedication to the late Ingrid Jonker.
Despite its flaws, my Christmas book gift was a good and memorable read. I cannot in all honesty say that I will reread the book like I reread Naipaul's Guerrillas every year but it will remain in my library as a special dedication to a pair of Afrikaans-speaking literary personalities whose voices and individual legacies heralded the beginning of a period of resistance, critical thinking and introspection for their community.
* Ingrid Jonker committed suicide by drowning in 1965. More than fifty years later, just before his death in 2015, Andre P. Brink released their love letters. The book, Flame in the Snow: The Love Letters of Andre P. Brink and Ingrid Jonker (Penguin Random House South Africa, 2015), contains more than 200 letters and telegrams exchanged between Brink and Jonker until shortly before her death.
The Ambassador's plot is simple and the primary settings for the main plot events are an ambassadorial residence and a dingy flat in a seedy part of Paris, in the sixties of the previous century. The ambitious, young Third Secretary at the South African embassy in France, Stephen Keyter, had decided to report the ambassador, Paul van Heerden, a married man, father and career diplomat, to the line ministry in Pretoria for ''unbecoming conduct'' with a woman of questionable morals. The woman in question is an immigrant Parisienne, Nicolette Alford, also originally from South Africa.
Keyter's decision is an act of vindictiveness, executed in typical bureaucratic fashion, the processes and procedures of which are vividly detailed in the book by Brink to impress upon the reader the importance of the observation of protocol, at all times, including rank and file, that govern the relationship between the ambassador, Van Heerden, and his Third Secretary, Keyter.
The point of contention between the younger man and his senior is Nicolette. Keyter had met her at the embassy and decided to pursue her, only to be rejected on numerous occasions, subjected to lies, evasions and often, treated with indifference. Instead of resigning himself to the nature of the dysfunctional relationship he appears to have with her, or even, walking away from the constant frustration she seems to cause him, Keyter becomes obsessed with her. His obsession turns into hatred when he discovers that Nicolette is having an affair with the ambassador, Van Heerden.
Van Heerden appears to be the only well-rounded character in the book and for me, reads intensely personal, almost as if Brink had based the character on himself and his troubled relationship with the poet, Ingrid Jonker. The references to Jonker are frequent and obvious. For example, as a young man in Cape Town, Van Heerden had met, on a stormy, windy night, a dark-haired young woman who desperately wanted ''to be free''. Ingrid Jonker had been slight of build and dark-haired. The young woman Van Heerden had met represented everything he was not and had challenged all his carefully constructed illusions about himself. In Brink's book, her name is given as Gillian but he may just as well have used her real name, Ingrid. Van Heerden's affair with Nicolette, who is physically dissimilar to but reminds him of Gillian (Ingrid, in other words) in lifestyle and spirit, is therefore a manifestation of his attraction to chaos, anarchy and an expression of his yearning for ''freedom''. Interestingly, the ambassador considers his tryst with Gillian one of the only, and few, ''mistakes'' in his otherwise orderly life.
The carefully observed protocols within the stately embassy disintegrate against the background of daily news reports from South Africa about civil unrest, a looming mineworkers' strike, swelling opposition against the South African government from ''Afro-Asian'' countries at the United Nations, and surprisingly, the successful conclusion of an arms deal with the French government. Juxtaposed with the ambassador's hitherto neat and tidy life consisting of diplomatic meetings and events accompanied by his well-behaved, poised wife who drinks too much, and a perfect daughter, is a pulsating Paris, beautiful and ugly at the same time, with its culture, cuisine and clochards, and struggling in its seedy bowels, a young female emigre eking out a living in a strip club.
The story is narrated from three first-person perspectives; the Third Secretary, Keyter, the Ambassador, Van Heerden, and Nicolette, and an omnipresent third-person narrator. The storyline construction is overall very good, the plot simple, some have said predictable, and the events chronological. Nicolette makes a surprising revelation which turns Keyter's romantic ordeal and the book's conclusion into miserable poignancy. I was left with a longing to see and breathe Brink's Paris and a sad nostalgia of sorts at the conclusion of the book for having knowledge of a time in a place I can never fully know.
What I liked most about Brink's story was his creativity in using for a rather pedestrian plot, that is, a younger man's unrequited love, an ageing diplomat's midlife crisis and sordid affair with a younger woman, who had ostensibly fled the very society that produced men such as Van Heerden and Keyter, an embassy as the setting in what is arguably the most romanticised European city, Paris. Brink's Paris (''bon Paree'') has all the anticipated main attractions plus beggars, poverty, infidelity, heartbreak, suicide and prostitutes. The city is glamorous and exciting, filthy and repulsive, also.
The novel has several eye-scratching flaws, though. It was one of Brink's earlier works. I was very much interested and intrigued by the positioning of his characters along his story-line to see how they well they interact and discovered that they are vehicles to tell the story more than they are relatable. It is, for example, very hard to empathise with any of the main or minor characters, including Nicolette. Even though the events in the story flow naturally and are well constructed, the dialogue between the characters is difficult, unnatural and superficial. There are several typos in the pulp edition I now have in my personal library. Against the backdrop of dramatic real world events in the late sixties and the rising objection to Apartheid, which, in other words, formed the proverbial ''bigger picture'', Brink had decided to write a small, personal story that would have been entirely insignificant had it not been for a three-word dedication to the late Ingrid Jonker.
Despite its flaws, my Christmas book gift was a good and memorable read. I cannot in all honesty say that I will reread the book like I reread Naipaul's Guerrillas every year but it will remain in my library as a special dedication to a pair of Afrikaans-speaking literary personalities whose voices and individual legacies heralded the beginning of a period of resistance, critical thinking and introspection for their community.
* Ingrid Jonker committed suicide by drowning in 1965. More than fifty years later, just before his death in 2015, Andre P. Brink released their love letters. The book, Flame in the Snow: The Love Letters of Andre P. Brink and Ingrid Jonker (Penguin Random House South Africa, 2015), contains more than 200 letters and telegrams exchanged between Brink and Jonker until shortly before her death.
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