EVERYBODY has been 11. Whether or not everyone remembers what it was like to be 11 is another matter, but it stands as an age of constants, between the changeability of childhood and the teenage years. Eleven, perhaps, stands for “growing up” – not in the sense of being independent, but rather knowing for the first time that there is such a thing as right and wrong, and a definite choice between them.
Jack Viljee, narrator and hero (of sorts) of The Dubious Salvation of Jack V, is 11 in 1989 in Joburg. The grip of apartheid is loosening (however imperceptibly) and the Berlin Wall is falling. Jack’s life is comfortable and secure, as are the lives of the majority of white South Africans in comparison with their black compatriots; schooldays are punctuated by visits to Ouma in the old-age home and weekends of braais and beers – “the anaesthesia of a comfort there for the taking”.
The Viljee household is an amalgamation of two opposing forces: while Jack’s mother is as English as English can be, his father is a boer whose father was reputedly something of an axe-wielding maniac. Apart from precocious Jack, there is Lisa, “the family oracle”, and Rachel, so lovable that “our affection manifested itself in cannibalistic longing”. Tacked on to the edge of the family tree, the customary addition to the average white family, there is Susie Mafisa, the maid and nanny.
While Jack’s allegiances waver between the English, the Afrikaans and even occasionally the Russians, his devotion to Susie never falters: “I loved Susie with the same possessive intensity that I loved my mother.” The arrival of Susie’s teenage son, Percy, however, arouses a jealousy in the boy who has grown accustomed to the love of two mothers.
Torn between his learnt dependence on the care of his nanny and the creeping knowledge that her devotion is a commodity rather than instinct, Jack’s reaction to Percy is “(an) equal measure of contempt and guilt”.
The consequence is a betrayal, which, albeit “of a minor kind”, is so pervasive that it haunts Jack’s conscience and poisons his innocence.
Against a backdrop of schoolboy rivalries, interminable games of Hi-Ho-Cherry-O with Rachel and the gradual decline of his mildly anti-Semitic, mildly racist Ouma, Jack is thrown into a turmoil of moral and sexual awakening.
He is somehow aware that his best friend Petrus is gay, but equally aware (perhaps determinedly so) that his fantasies about Chad, the handsome orphan from Mayfair Boys’ Home, do not make him one.
In the midst of a world apparently governed by arbitrary rules, Jack has calculated not only “the degree and spread of niceness across Johannesburg”, but also the giddying potential fame should he perchance be the victim of a snake bite or similarly tragic occurrence.
The Dubious Salvation of Jack V is undoubtedly one of the most entertaining and intelligently-written South African novels on the shelves.
The character of Jack is poised at an age of acute observation but somewhat limited understanding, providing an unflinching account of life that is both hilarious and heartbreaking.
Despite the fact that racial segregation is an overriding theme, this novel is not merely a rehashing of the many apartheid novels already on offer; the perspective of a child is uniquely honest and fresh. Jack’s frailties do not alienate the reader as much as they serve as a reminder that people are not, by nature, particularly courageous – that courage may be achieved only as the result of effort, not instinct.
Such courage is illusive, as Jack painfully discovers, believing himself in retrospect to have a character predisposed to “cowardice and a tendency to do what was expedient”.
Indeed, he does admit that “for R5 my 11-year-old self would have joined the Hitler Youth”. Bittersweet and sometimes cruelly candid, The Dubious Salvation of Jack V is a gem not to be missed. - The Argus