Book Review : Priest as Odd Man Out in the Maze of South Africa

Kruger’s Alp by Christopher Hope (Elizabeth Sifton Books--Viking: $15.95)

Blanchaille is a white man on a black continent. He is an Englishman in an Afrikaner society. He is a Catholic among mostly Protestant Englishmen. And he is a priest among Catholic laymen.

The fourfold marginal man, in other words. And with a visionary irony, Christopher Hope uses him as a kind of reversed archetype of the tortured implant that is the Republic of South Africa. A wandering Candide, Father Blanchaille has become a rebel largely because he incarnates at an extreme the righteousness, stubbornness and sense of divine mission that is the Boer tradition.

“Kruger’s Alp” is a parable of considerable wit and uneven texture. At its best, it is a rich weave of telling absurdities. Sometimes, though, and particularly toward the end, the parabolic mechanics become obtrusive as the author maneuvers each one of his allegorical chickens back to its roost.

For no apparent reason, the whole book is presented as the dream of a narrator whose only function is to dream it, and who plays no other role. The dream concerns the adult adventures and misadventures of a small band of companions who were altar boys together and disciples to a cynical, far-seeing and eccentric priest, Father Lynch.

Lynch’s message, which his disciples grow away from and eventually return to, is that the true mythical bedrock of South Africa is not the Boers’ long trek into the hinterland, nor their hewing of a prosperous country out of the wilderness, nor the ferocity of their fight for independence under the legendary Oom Paul Kruger. Instead, it is Kruger’s flight into exile in Switzerland, reputedly carrying a cache of gold with him. South Africa’s essence, so Lynch’s heretical prophesy goes, is not the last-ditch stand but the carefully prepared boat-hole.

Lynch appears, disappears and reappears, but the book focuses upon the wanderings of his disciples. There are the two black brothers--Gabriel, who becomes a sleek and successful priest, and Looksmart, who becomes a revolutionary. There is Kipsel, who works with the revolutionaries; and Ferreira, who becomes a government official. There is Van Vuuren, the senior boy, whom Lynch envisages as a future priest but who becomes a policeman instead. And finally, there is Blanchaille, whose idealism convinces Lynch that he should be a policeman, but who becomes a priest.

Lynch insists that Blanchaille is a policeman, nevertheless, and explains away his costume by arguing that he is on a secret mission. Reversals are the key to everything. By the time the book ends, Van Vuuren and Ferreira will turn out to have been working for the opposition; Looksmart, the liberationist, will try to work out a homeland deal with the regime, and Magda, a revolutionary sexpot, will turn out to be a police spy.

Blanchaille, once ordained, goes to work in the black squatter camps until they become a fashionable object of liberal concern. Then, with the slogan “charity kills,” he calls for them to be closed so that a tide of black vagrants will flood the white communities and bring them to a sense of reality.

His life threatened, he flees abroad with the help of Lynch and Van Vuuren, who receives him at police headquarters to give him his exit papers. The policeman takes him through the holding cells and shows him a right-wing extremist whose zeal embarrasses the regime, and a black revolutionary whose followers find it more convenient to have him in jail. Van Vuuren works to disabuse Blanchaille of his belief in good and evil.

Blanchaille’s flight takes him first to London, where he is joined by Kipsel, detested by the opposition as a presumed government informer but, in fact, the victim of a government disinformation plot.

Reversal succeeds reversal, and Blanchaille and Kipsel set out for Switzerland to discover the fabled Alp where Kruger’s cache may lie.

After various adventures, which tend to take on more and more of a didactic tone, they reach Kruger’s Alp. It is a dreamlike palace of refuge where all varieties of servants and opponents of the regime gather. It is a great sanitarium in the sky, a place for those whose mental gyrations on all sides of the South African contortion have worn them out.

“Kruger’s Alp” suffers from its excessive allegorizing, from frequent crudity or sloppiness of narration, and at times from the overpowering blackness of its irony. Its bleak appraisal of the country’s would-be liberationists may offend. On the other hand, Hope’s point is not really cynicism. It is, rather, to pinpoint the image of South Africa as an artificial graft and to chart the universal sickness that ensues when the phenomenon of rejection sets in.