Yesterday at Crawford Doyle, I was moved by an unforeseen whim to pick up Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room, one of the many Man Booker 2010 finalists that I did not read last year. From Maria Russo’s review in the Times I got the impression — read in by me, I’m afraid — that the narrator of the book’s three linked novella was a bit of a masochist who couldn’t be comfortable with comfort. Now I can’t remember what made me change my mind. Nor can I remember what made me pick the book up last night, instead of the dozens of others that I’m in the middle of. It seems that the experience of reading In a Strange Room has blotted out the traces that led me to it. Reading the first story, “The Follower,” was certainly a surprising experience, for the last thing I expected was that I’d be laughing out loud, wishing that I could read out some of the more pungent bits to friends.

Two men, a German and a South African, meet on a road in Greece, heading in opposite directions. The next thing you know, the German has changed course, and the two men are visiting a ruin together. Reiner, the German, retails the story of Agamemnon’s bloody welcome-home after the Trojan War. Then, like a boy who has tired of a plaything, he claims not to take much interest in myths, and proposes a climb up the neighboring mountain. Why, asks Damon, the South African.

Because, he says. He is smiling again, there is a peculiar glint in his eye, some kind of challenge has been issued that it would be failure to refuse.

They start to climb. On the lower slope there is a ploughed field they walk carefully around, then the mountain goes up steeply, they pick their way through undergrowth and pull themselves through branches. The higher they go the more jumbled and dangerous the rocks become. After an hour or so they have come out on a lower shoulder of the mountain with its tall peak looming overhead, but he [Damon] doesn’t want to go further than this. Here, he says. Here, Reiner says, looking up, have you had enough. Yes. There is a moment before the answer comes, okay, and when they settle themselves on a rock the German has a strange sardonic look on his face.

Reiner explains to his new friend that he’s taking a trip in order to think through whether he ought to get married. Damon replies that he is simply trying to forget someone, and that this someone is not a woman.

Reiner makes a gesture on the air, as if he is throwing something away. A man or a woman, he says, it makes no difference to me.

And it doesn’t, because it isn’t sex that draws Reiner to Damon. And let it be noted that the follower here is Reiner. It is Reiner who changes his plans at the beginning, and Reiner who flies to South Africa so that he and Damon can go hiking there. Damon’s desire for Reiner does not really seem to be any clearer. In comparison to Damon’s “thin and pale and edible” body, Reiner’s is “brown and hard, perfectly proportioned.

He knows that he is beautiful and somehow this makes him ugly.

Of course it does, because in fact you cannot know that you are beautiful; you can know only that your appearance gives you power over other people. To add the consciousness of this power to your beauty is to turn it into a weapon.

Galgut’s understatement about a man’s desire for another man would be irritating if he did not exploit it to demonstrate how, when two men decide to engage with one another beyond the conventions of friendly mutual cooperation, their relationship, whether eroticized or not, will be clouded by claims of power and priority, both real and imagined. As Reiner and Damon push themselves rather pointlessly through the unwelcoming landscape of Lesotho, the childishness of their power struggle manages, in Galgut’s laconic prose, to seem more inadvertently funny than exasperating.

Over the top of the ridge on the right there is a steep drop, halfway down is a cave larger than the one they slept in last night. Reiner wants to climb to it. But it’s a long way down. So what. So we have to climb back up again. So what. There is another moment of unspoken conflict, the sardonic mockery in the dark eyes of the one man wins over the reluctance of the weaker man, they pick their way down between boulders and aloes, loose pebbles scattering under their feet.

But is Damon the weaker man? It suits him to say so — just as it suits him to strike the note of “sardonic mockery.” In fact, Damon’s one moment of weakness comes when he loses it after a storm, and pours forth a denunciation of his companion, whereupon he abandons their trek. Not following Reiner — that is the weakness. Later, when both men are in Pretoria, still interested in one another but too vain to meet, Damon realizes that Reiner is telling people a version of the story in which he, Damon, is the bad friend. “The two stories push against each other, they will never be reconciled, he wants to argue and explain till the other story disappears.” That’s what I mean by “both real and imagined.” Reiner really indulges in power plays, but that’s not to say that Damon’s understanding of them is not somewhat  imaginary. There is no objective reality here, only a bristling competition of motives, both between the men and within each of them. 

I don’t think that I’ve ever seen the hopeless combination of manly moodiness, caprice, and mortal one-upsmanship presented so starkly and unsentimentally, not even in film. Galgut doesn’t give his characters the chance to kid us with the pretense of grown-up feelings. We’re taught that maturity follows puberty because puberty teaches us that other people feel things as deeply as we do. And maybe it does. But Galgut’s two followers are proof that puberty doesn’t necessarily make us care.

In a Strange Room is not billed as a novel, and that’s just as well, because the “three journeys” of its subtitle are very different trips, and the third story, while highly dramatic in itself, does not serve as any kind of climax to the foregoing two. If anything, it stands for the proposition that climaxes occurring in later life, while more harrowing, carry less significance. What’s very interesting and character-forming for a twentysomething is likely to be blankly catastrophic for someone over fifty, while, from the observer’s standpoint, the amusingly quirky behavior of callow youth is likely or ought to be smoothed out almost to blandness by middle age.  

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 8th, 2011 at 6:00 pm.