Hope, heaven & hell

Christopher Hope left his native Johannesburg, South Africa for England in 1974 following the banning of his first book A Separate Development, prohibited by the censors because it “denigrated authority” and “was politically inflammatory”. For the writer, whose novel Serenity House was short listed for the Booker Prize in 1992, the only sane response to such a regime was not simply to decry it, but to “celebrate their stupidity. They deserved it.”

He’s been celebrating that stupidity ever since. Hope’s latest novel Heaven Forbid continues to mirror the personal and political, placing the writer’s fall from childhood grace against the wider backdrop of the National Party’s 1948 electoral victory and the onset of apartheid – in effect South Africa’s own loss of innocence. For Hope, political awareness was not the optional extra it is in other parts of the world.

“If you’ve grown up in one of the liberal democracies where the National Health is a big issue, it’s not the same thing as if you grow up in a place where serious people wish to kill other people and see this as a pretty matter of fact thing,” he reflects. “The South Africa where I grew up went from a fairly benign form of white paternalism to a form of insanity, a worship of skin colour which was put in place in 1948 when I was four years old. For the next 50 years a kind of racialist nationalism took over, and it was like living in an institution. The inmates had taken over and they were running things.

“Where I came from, politics was the air you breathed,” he continues, “it wasn’t something extraneous to daily life. And the politics that were happening were truly so appalling that one moved through stages of incredulity to depression to a kind of wild hilarity. In a sense you saw the dark and comic enchantment of it, it was the Theatre of the Absurd, lashings of Artaudian cruelty run by very fat men in large shorts who were completely off their heads. Semi-totalitarian or totalitarian societies are theatrical to a degree which happier societies aren’t. It’s a strange business. It’s not that people like Mussolini set out to look funny and put on strange uniforms and trot about, it’s somehow as if the nature of politics and hatred and nationalism simply means that your word horde, your vocabulary, decreases, your propensity for pomposity goes up and your ability to move from bombast to bombs speeds up. And worst of all you go around doing terrible things in the name of believing it’s jolly good for people when you do it.”

Yet, as Hope points out with characteristic irony, despite their theatricality the apostles of South African apartheid couldn’t even boast the snazzy Nazi factor, the leather coats and jackboots and strong-arm glamour of fascism.

“I always thought our brownshirts – because that’s basically what they were, neo-Nazis, neo-fascists – emphatically lacked glamour,” he laughs. “They were kind of thrift shop Nazis. And in a way sometimes you were rather disappointed in that, you thought, ‘Well look, if you guys are going to espouse the philosophy, if you’re going to go through the racial purity bit, you could at least wear better boots!’ So, politically one was horrified, but aesthetically I think you were really peeved, you felt they could’ve tried harder! I loved my grandfather for many things, but one of the things I loved him for most of all was boy could he dress. And even dressing, as he pointed out to me, was taken as a form of provocation in a country which valued beer, balls and BMWs over just about anything else, it was seen as un-South African somehow – a phrase which was used a lot at the time.”

Hope’s grandfather was a Cork exile who arrived in pre-apartheid South Africa with the same brave new world optimism as many of those who docked in Boston. Ask the writer how he views reports of racially motivated attacks on non-nationals in Ireland and he says this:

“It’s very interesting to see how otherwise liberal-minded people react – and this applies from Kosovo to County Cork – when too many of ‘them’ start popping up on the radar screen of your mind. I think the fact of the matter is it is unstoppable. People are moving. And the irony for a South African is that everybody, when threatened ethnically, appears to react in the same way, they draw into the lager and behave in a way which makes me feel quite homesick really! Perversely, it’s a sense of distant consolation – I’m overwhelmed by feelings of nostalgia!”

Given that Hope characterises South Africa as “a society in need of an extremely good shrink”, does he think post-colonial neuroses can ever fully work itself out of a country?

“You know there are lucky post-colonial societies,” he responds, “most of them have extinguished their own indigenous populations! It’s perfectly possible to be a Canadian and no one knows nor cares that there were once native Canadians. It’s not even a question of ignoring it, it’s blissful ignorance, stunning stuff, and the Americans are quite the same, Australians too. And I have to say I look on with a degree of envy. Clearly if you’re going to be a successful colonist, first extinguish the indigenous population, do a good job with it and everything else

will follow!”