Shooting Angels
Christopher Hope
Atlantic
The richest and most unsettling aspect of Christopher Hope’s novel, Shooting Angels, is its setting. The action opens in a tough, scrubby town, its inhabitants worshipping violence and sports – but where is this place? South Africa? Australia?
The sense of dislocation continues to nag as Charlie Croker, a man hiding from his past, encounters his old friend Joe Angel. Charlie must return to the nation’s capital, where he revisits the devastating events of his youth.
The capital contains much that is familiar to South Africans. There is the fascist history; the current government’s talk of cadres and comrades; individuals amassing wealth; and the massaging of the past to suit the powerful.
Even the deeds of particular people – like Thabo Mbeki, Julius Malema and Brett Kebble – have their counterparts in this fictional world.
Still, Hope also takes care to keep his state nameless and distinct from South Africa. The geography differs; the history includes domination by all groups in turn; and religious conflict – rather than racial strife – prevails.
This shaken-up South Africa is intriguing, also disconcerting. One never feels one knows the place.
But Hope’s non-South Africa serves his themes well. His country seems stuffed with even more contradictions and oppositions than the real place.
This gives the author plenty of material to explore what might be called the intimacy of opposites: the idea that things are closely allied with what they oppose.
Someone might flip from martyr to killer. An interrogator and victim may bond emotionally. A revolutionary regime can end up like its predecessor. An individual might at once be an idealist and a betrayer. This intimacy of opposites is familiar to South Africans; as Evita Bezuidenhout pointed out some years ago, “Thabo” is an anagram of “Botha”.
Hope’s setting – which includes a dizzying succession of regimes – allows him to bring out another theme: that it is tragically tempting to forget the past.
One must observe and record in order to prevent people from falling into oblivion, or having their lives recast to suit others.
Several characters in Shooting Angels are strong, not easily forgotten: Joe Angel, the flamboyant and secretive man with the vulpine grin, reared in a Sicilian cave, risen to become a freedom fighter and a concrete magnate, and Le Moerr, a Special Branch interrogator who yearns to be remembered after the regime he supports has fallen.
Hope’s novel does feel thin in parts and some characters are slight or implausible. The love of Charlie’s life is pretty and purposeful, but we learn little else about her except that she is good in bed and at making bombs. Even if this is sufficient for Charlie to care for her, it may not be enough for the reader; she does not quite come alive on the page.
And, although the rector of Joe and Charlie’s school is described as canny, some of his actions seem absurd, if not insane.
Though this novel is not always convincing, a complex setting, intriguing themes and some compelling characters make it worth reading.