Mammals in Love

Zakes Mda's latest novel is set in South Africa and features an unusual seaside love triangle. By Madison Smartt Bell

The Whale Caller

Zakes Mda Farrar, Straus & Giroux,

€20

Zakes Mda's previous novels have been compared, flatteringly, to the work of Gabriel García Márquez and to Chinua Achebe's classic Things Fall Apart. Mda's injection of magical realism into a South African setting is also reminiscent of novels like Waiting for the Barbarians and Life & Times of Michael K by his countryman JM Coetzee, in which Coetzee uses faintly fantastic, otherworldly settings to suggest South Africa under apartheid without ever having to say anything about it directly. But in Mda's new novel, The Whale Caller, a post-apartheid South African setting is more or less realistically rendered. The fantastic or magical elements are all in the foreground, incorporated into the action among the principal characters.

The Whale Caller of the title lives in the coastal village of Hermanus, a favourite destination for whale-watching tourists. He communes with whales with his kelp horn, an instrument painstakingly created out of seaweed dried in the crooked and twisted shapes suited to producing the deep and hollow sounds of the whales. If these details sound fanciful, they are not; Hermanus exists, furnished with whales, kelp horns and a real whale crier, who appears in the novel only to be distinguished from the Whale Caller.

The official whale crier is employed by the tourist office to guide visitors to the whales with his horn; the Whale Caller, by contrast, prefers not to be a public figure. His relationship to whales, and to one whale in particular, is both mystical and romantic. He exists to serenade Sharisha, a southern right she-whale whose seasonal comings and goings set the rhythm of his life. Though a native of Hermanus, he has spent 35 years away; no one knew him anymore. Aside from the whales, his only contact is with Mr Yodd, an intangible entity believed by the Whale Caller to inhabit a grotto just above the waterline. Mr Yodds only reply to the Whale Caller's copious confessions is occasional laughter.

The whales, especially Sharisha, seem to be more responsive: she lobtails repeatedly, making loud smacking sounds that leave the Whale Caller breathing more and more heavily.

He blows the horn and screams as if in agony. He is drenched in sweat as his horn ejaculates sounds that rise from deep staccatos to high-pitched wails. Sharisha emits a very deep hollow sound. Despite the erotic charge of such encounters, the Whale Caller can't entirely cross the species gap; instead he must watch from the shore as Sharisha is ravaged by other whales. His attention shifts in part to a human partner, Saluni, the enigmatically attractive town drunk whose mouldy yet sweet smell somehow reminds him of his mother.

"I am a love child," Saluni is wont to scream at moments when her will is thwarted.

"Don't do this to me, man, I am a love child!" The story she has fabricated about her conception is no more fantastic than many other events of the novel, including but not limited to the various subplots in which Saluni is involved, like her relationship with the Bored Twins, a pair of semi-feral children who, though they sing angelically, hardly seem more human than Sharisha.

Stripped of such whimsical embroidery, the story of Saluni and the Whale Caller still holds up: here are two people in late middle age, struggling to nourish love and sustain a relationship in spite of ingrained habits, each willing to change for the other, but only up to a point. Alas, Sharisha the whale is a cumbersome third partner, and though the resulting love triangle provides some delicious moments of operatic comedy, Saluni's fate is arbitrary enough to make one wonder what Mda's larger purposes here could possibly be.

Unlike Coetzee's early novels, The Whale Caller does not seem to be a disguised commentary on contemporary South Africa, whose complexities are present but always incidental to a story that could have happened anywhere there are whales, kelp and a population of the marginalised poor. Yet the novel does not have the aura of elemental parable that Achebe achieved in Things Fall Apart or the strength of magical realism. As practiced by García Márquez and his numerous followers, magical realism resembles real mythology in its organised references to submerged patterns of meaning whose source may be the divine creators of the universe or the archetypes of the collective unconscious or simply the imagination of the storyteller. The Whale Caller has no such resonance. It more resembles a story made up serially for children who are not expected to remember all the episodes together or try to understand them as a coherent whole. Take away the fantastic decoration, and the characters behaviour is at best merely eccentric, at worst insane.

Pointlessness may be Mda's point here; perhaps he intends to show us nothing more than people nattering into an empty grotto that only their wistful imaginations have invested with a Mr Yodd. If so, The Whale Caller is a much bleaker work.

Madison Smartt Bell's most recent novel is The Stone That the Builder Refused.

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