Jimfish E-Book

Christopher Hope

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

In the 1980s, a small man is pulled up out of the Indian Ocean in Port Pallid, SA, claiming to have been kidnapped as a baby. The Sergeant, whose job it is to sort the local people by colour, and thereby determine their fate, peers at the boy, then sticks a pencil into his hair, as one did in those days, waiting to see if it stays there, or falls out before he gives his verdict: 'He's very odd, this Jimfish you've hauled in. If he's white he is not the right sort of white. But if he's black, who can say? We'll wait before we classify him. I'll give his age as 18, and call him Jimfish. Because he's a real fish out of water, this one is.' So begins the odyssey of Jimfish, a South African Everyman, who defies the usual classification of race that defines the rainbow nation. His journey through the last years of Apartheid will extend beyond the borders of South Africa to the wider world, where he will be an unlikely witness to the defining moments of the dying days of the twentieth century. Part fable, part fierce commentary on the politics of power, this work is the culmination of a lifetime's writing and thinking, on both the Apartheid regime and the history of the twentieth century, by a writer of enormous originality and range.

Leseprobe

Jimfish

Also by Christopher Hope

NOVELS

A Separate DevelopmentKruger’s AlpThe Hottentot RoomMy Chocolate RedeemerSerenity HouseMe, the Moon and Elvis PresleyDarkest EnglandHeaven ForbidMy Mother’s LoversShooting Angels

SHORT STORIES

The Love Songs of Nathan J. SwirskyLearning to FlyThe Garden of Bad Dreams

NON-FICTION

White Boy RunningMoscow, MoscowSigns of the HeartBrothers under the Skin: Travels in Tyranny

POETRY

Cape DrivesEnglishmenIn the Country of the Black Pig

FOR CHILDREN

The King, the Cat and the Fiddle (with Yehudi Menuhin)The Dragon Wore Pink

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Christopher Hope, 2015

The moral right of Christopher Hope to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 0 85789 805 0Trade Paperback ISBN: 978 0 85789 806 7E-book ISBN: 978 0 85789 808 1

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic BooksAn imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondon WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

To Bella, Blake, Antony

Like much else in Jimfish, not only are many events all-too real – the collapse of ex-Yugoslavia, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the red berets of the Fifth Commando in Zimbabwe with their zeal for massacres, Mobutu’s many palaces – but also, more by luck than judgement, I was there for a lot of them. And made notes. Because what I saw of the facts easily outstripped fiction.

Jim Fish: an insulting term for a black man; also used as a form of address.

Oxford Dictionary of South African English

Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.

Voltaire

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

CHAPTER 1

Port Pallid, South Africa, 1984

In the mad middle years of the 1980s, in Port Pallid on the Indian Ocean, the old skipper of an inshore trawler, the Lady Godiva, was standing on the harbour wall one day, watching a line of leaping dolphins slicing through the waves, when he felt a tap on his shoulder.

‘When I turned around,’ he told Sergeant Arlow, ‘there stood this boykie on the lip of the sea wall, looking at me with sea-green eyes. He might have come right up from the water, he was that close to it.’

‘Better haul him in and let me see him,’ said Sergeant Arlow, a great bear of a man, who decided all moral questions in Port Pallid. ‘We will make a plan.’

The people of Port Pallid caught, thought, bought and sold fishes and weighed, sorted and grouped them into neat little piles; and they did much the same with people, adhering to the religion of Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, a Dutch visionary who taught that people were happiest when coralled in separate ethnic enclosures, colour-coded for ease of identification and tightly controlled. All moral questions were matters for the police, and since Sergeant Arlow was the entire police force in Port Pallid it was he who decided to which group people belonged and whether their papers and passes and permits were in order.