BOOK REVIEW: Call It Dog, by Marli Roode

 What do you do when your estranged father gets in touch after ten years without contact asking for your help?  That is what happens to twenty-three-year-old journalist, Jo Hartslief, when she returns to South Africa to cover the disturbances in Alexandria, a township near Johannesburg. After a decade living in the UK with her grandmother following the death of her mother, the country of her birth already feels alien to her. During her absence much has changed, on the surface at least, but dig deeper and it’s still a country struggling to come to terms with its complicated and bloody past. Jo undergoes a rollercoaster ride of complex emotions which force her to re-examine her sense of Self. Marli Roode valiantly mirrors this often painful journey in her story’s plot, exploring a father/daughter relationship gone sour down into its darkest and most disturbing crevices. In turn, both these internal personal interrogations act as a kind of literary reflector device to the very real atrocities still happening in the South Africa of the present day.

 Roode narration of Jo’s experiences in the first person, as though they were entirely her own rather than being merely semi-autobiographical, emphasize her emotional pain, making it clear that Jo is not yet reconciled with her past. Similarly, calling her father, Nico, by his name adds to the deep sense of estrangement she feels towards him.

 “I find him in Empangeni” is how Jo introduces her father to the reader. Her cool tone, devoid of any spark of pleasure, immediately establishes their distant, uneasy relationship. From the very outset they play a dangerous cat and mouse game of emotional manipulation, lies, and false assurances. Nico is clearly scared, but instead of telling her his story from start to finish, allowing her to fully assess his situation in order she may try to help him, he drip-feeds information in such a way that Jo has no way of knowing which bits, if any at all, are true. Her father explains that the police are after him for allegedly killing a black man and that he needs to show Jo exactly the spot where it is meant to have happened. They embark on a road trip during which he effectively kidnaps her. As they travel through the hot and unrelentingly barren landscape Nico drugs her bottled water, steals her phone and keys and Jo has the distinct feeling that if he goes down her father is determined that so will she.

 Roode jumps back and forth in time between when she first arrived in South Africa on her journalist’s assignment, to almost the novel’s conclusion and then back to the developing story. This use of anachronism is sometimes a little confusing, but is probably meant to heighten the sense of tension and uncertainty. In this, the device is certainly successful.

The author does not spare the reader from the violence and bloody history of the country of her birth. She paints the political narrative of  the contemporary South Africa which informs her novel in the crudest of brushstrokes, bringing home the point that although on the surface much has changed since the Referendum, beneath the veneer of equal rights for all, however, the situation is as dark and brutal as ever.

By the end of the book Jo is no closer to ‘knowing’ her father or the extent of his involvement in the murder. In fact, the mystery deepens when she wakes up in a hospital bed with no memory of how she got there. By going on what occurred during their road trip and through a degree of guesswork she pieces together what might have happened. Jo believes her father got scared and desperate enough to try and frame her for the crime he committed by staging an accident. While she is in hospital where the police can potentially find and question her Nico went on the run.

 Once she has recovered Jo receives a further shock when she learns that the murdered man was the father of her friend and fellow journalist, Paul and his sister, Lindiwe. She begins to wonder whether Nico also had something to do with the car accident her mother died in. With their help she tracks her father’s last known movements and discovers that instead of owning and living in several comfortable country homes as he had told Jo, Nico, in fact, lived in squalor and poverty in a tiny flat without furniture. Amongst his things she finds proof of the kind of gruesome deeds her father might really be capable of.

 The conclusion of Call It Dog feels a little desperate and cobbled-together, as though the author had suddenly lost the clear view of her storyline, but that is a problem many debut novelists and, on occasion, even very established writers grapple with. In no way, then, should the shortcomings of the last chapter or so of this book detract the reader from what is, ultimately, a brave and highly successful attempt to tell a difficult story set in the politically complex climate of South Africa at the close of the twentieth century.   

REF:  Call It Dog, by Marli Roode
Publisher: Atlantic Books, June 2013, 335 pages, pb

07/08/13