Book Review : Of Power, Prejudice and Corruption

The Powers That Be by Mike Nicol. (Atlantic Monthly Press: $17.95; 176 pp.)

“The Powers That Be,” by the South African writer Mike Nicol, is a rich and turbulent parable of an innocent community destroyed by an insane Principle of order.

Lying along a remote bay somewhere on the South African coast, the Settlement--it is given no other name--is a peaceable kingdom of fishermen; an easy-going mix of the descendants of shipwrecked Portuguese and Philippine sailors, Norwegian whalers, an aboriginal clan of clam-gathering strand-lopers, an English grande dame named Lady Sarah, an Indian trader, and one or two others.

It is a kind of disheveled Arcadia with no particular rules, other than an unspoken commitment to hospitality and mutual assistance. A good deal of melon-wine is consumed, and a potent drug with the faculty, as Capt. Beg-rip, one of the whalers, puts it, of allowing one to “see the sound a bee was making as it tripped among the wild daisies.”

Odd Prosperity

It also enjoys an odd prosperity. Fagmie, the trader, stocks his general store with imported delicacies whose source, as it turns out, are the pebbles that the villagers collect on the beach when they have nothing more pressing to do. Fagmie and Montague Planke, the baker, dispose of the pebbles through the regular visits of Nahamqua Drift who sails his boat up from Cape Town and sails back, eluding the Customs and Excise patrols on the lookout for illegal diamonds.

Much of this we do not learn until the story is halfway done. It begins not with Arcadia but with Arcadia assaulted. It begins, in fact, with the violent and domineering Capt. Nunes sitting on his porch as he does each morning, and being shaved by Frieda, his silent 18-year-old daughter.

It is no scene of domestic amity; it is a scene of epic weirdness. There is a suggestion of Garcia Marques by black light; of some perverted Col. Manuel Buendia, as Nicol writes:

“Frieda had been shaving the captain for 10 years, ever since the death of her mother.

“ ‘Ah-man, it doesn’t matter if you are only eight,’ her father had said. ‘The men of this family have always been shaved by their women, so you will have to learn.’

“Frieda could remember that as he said it, he paused with a lump of ice in his hand to look at her, and kept staring for such a long time that water began to trickle between his fingers; then he smiled and went back to packing the ice around the body of his wife. In that heat her mother’s corpse wouldn’t stop perspiring and they used up all the ice in the fridge waiting for the doctor.”

It is not only the shaving that Frieda had to take over from her mother; it is her place in the captain’s bed.

The Village Despot

Nunes works for the Customs Service, but with his arrival in the Settlement, he becomes the village despot. Since everyone is of comfortably-mixed blood, he has to invent apartheid from scratch. Arbitrarily, he divides the villagers into two classes, first and second, with the former allowed to sit and drink in Fagmie’s store. He issues proclamations prohibiting dances and carousing, orders curfews, calls people in for long shouted interrogations. When Augustin, the preacher, objects, Nunes pulls out his revolver and sends a shot over his head.

He is bent upon rooting out the village secret. Why, before his arrival, was Fagmie’s shop so well-stocked and well-patronized? Why are its shelves now bare? It will become clear later on--the diamond trade has stopped--but at the start, we have only the town’s mystery, and Nunes’ arbitrary ferocity, burning in his stomach and giving him boils.

Nicol has chosen to withhold his depiction of the village, its history and its inhabitants until the second half of the book. This constrains the events of the first half into pure fable. The war between Nunes and the villagers is unrelieved, unexplained, archetypal. It has force and horror, but it also feels arbitrary and unattached.

Particularly arbitrary is Nunes’ sudden abandonment of his brutality. He puts away his revolver, relaxes his prohibitions, and strolls about the village engaging in peaceful conversation. He orders Frieda to make friends with a fisherman’s son. They become lovers and she becomes pregnant.

Hidden Motives

Nunes’ amiability has a purpose: To see if he can get the villagers to talk. But we have already seen him in such a grotesque light that a sudden rational purpose seems contrived. The villagers are almost on the point of talking, in fact, thinking that since the captain now appears to be as human as they are, he will take a human approach to their diamond-gathering.

But being human is too much of a strain. An old German settler reminds him of the good ol’ days, when the whites simply massacred any natives who proved troublesome. Nunes’ life principle requires him to rage and bully; furthermore, he is jealous of his daughter’s entanglement. He reverts to violence; there are beatings and killings. Nunes’ fury literally incinerates him--another of the magic-realist touches that flavor the book--and the settlement withers away like a dream that cannot return.

We are not told why the villagers are unable to go back to their old way of life now that Nunes is destroyed. Nicol seems to suggest that the furor of command in South African society will end up by consuming itself; but not before it has sowed salt in the furrows where peace and humanity might come back to flower.

Nicol has written a lovely and powerful book that does not quite come together. He has difficulty joining his parable of rage with the beguiling portrait of his innocent and idiosyncratic bay-side community. Perhaps he should not have waited so far into the book to put this portrait together.