A thoroughly enjoyable read. (Review by Margaret
von Klemperer, courtesy of The Witness)
On the title page of Patagonia, the novel is subtitled “A Fugue”, a piece of music
introduced by one voice or instrument and taken up by others, and that is
exactly how Maya Fowler’s excellent tale is structured.
Tertius de Klerk is an incompetent
university lecturer whose career has stalled, and whose marriage to the feisty
Alta seems to be zooming towards the rocks. Whatever he tries to do is doomed
as, hapless and inarticulate, he totters from one minor disaster to another –
until the day he gets drunk and falls into bed with a student. The ensuing
catastrophe is bigger than anything he could have imagined. Tertius is not the
quickest thinker you will ever meet in fiction, but in a panic he decides to
head for Patagonia, the remote South American region where various Boers headed
after the Anglo-Boer war, hankering for wide open spaces and no British
bullies. He has some remote, unknown relatives there, and maybe they will help
him – or at least shelter him.
The next character we meet, back in the
early 19th Century, is Basjan, Tertius’s great-grandfather, also escaping to
Patagonia, though not for quite the same reasons as the other travellers he is
with: he has plenty to hide. And then we encounter the other two voices in this
fugue – Tertius’s wife Alta who has no intention of letting her errant husband
off lightly and is in hot pursuit of him and Salome, tough, desperate and
pregnant who is hunting down Basjan. The men are running away while the women
are on a quest. Perhaps Patagonia stands as a metaphor, for an escape on the
one hand, a hunt on the other.
But that makes the novel sound altogether
too serious. Fowler writes beautifully – her descriptions of the four journeys
and the empty aridity of the southern tip of South America are riveting, while
Tertius’s encounter with his cousin Alejo who lives on a remote dilapidated
farm and speaks a deliciously fractured language is hilarious. There are
serious themes in Patagonia that will stay with the reader, leaving things to
ponder after the book is closed, but the rake’s progress of the four main
characters on their disparate journeys is hugely entertaining. A thoroughly
enjoyable read. - Margaret von Klemperer
Patagonia is published by Umuzi. ISBN 978-1-4152-0925-7
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