White Lightening

I have just finished reading the above mentioned title - another wonderful book by Justin Cartwright. White Lightening was published in 2002 and I found a well read copy of it is the local Kwinana Library.

The story, told in the first person, is about James Kronk a man in his forties who returns to South Africa, the home of his youth, to sit by the bedside of his dying mother. When I read The Promise of Happiness recently I had a sense that all the characters in the book were a part of a whole; that is in the sense that our personalities take on different shades according to what life is dishing up in the moment. In a line in that book one of his characters says that she is a different person to who she used to be. I felt that whatever a character said or whatever they did were somehow a part of the author's character. It was inspirational to read the book because it gave me an insight into writing characters - because there are fragments of my inner life that could take on a life of their own and live themselves out in a novel. But to return to White Lightening: In this book we see the world through the main characters eyes. To make it interesing the character has some crazy fault lines running through his personality and he lives with the grief of the death of his only son - who died when he was having an affair with an actress while working as a director on a porn movie! The action takes place on the coast of South Africa in between his visits to his mother's bedside. The title comes from an event in his early life when he won a running race and broke a world record for a boy under 18 years of age. It took me a while to get into the book as it jumps around a bit in time giving flash-backs to his life in films, but I knew that it would be worth the effort to stick with it. The main character finds out that he has inherited some money and decides to buy a local run-down farm. The action centres around a fantasy he has of making his life in a rural heaven. He befriends a baboon who comes with the property and takes a family of African's living in a makeshift shelter in the sand dunes under his wing. However his efforts end in failure, reflecting other failures in his life. Even so it was fun accompanying him in his ruminations about life as I recovered first from a tummy upset and secondly from a throat infection.