Kruger's Alp E-Book

Christopher Hope

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Theodore Blanchaille is searching for the missing millions of the Boer leader Paul Kruger, and his lost city of gold. As a child he had heard tales of Kruger from a wayward priest; what follows is an astonishing journey that takes Blanchaille through a landscape peopled with spies, visionaries, terrorists, traitors, patriots and exiled presidents. From huge transit camps on the veld to a notorious prison block, from a township in the bloody aftermath of 'pacification' to a secret travellers' rest for fleeing pilgrims, and from the streets and cellars of Soho to paradise at last on a Swiss mountainside, Kruger's Alp is a fantastical political satire of extraordinary invention.

Leseprobe

KRUGER’S ALP

Christopher Hope was born in Johannesburg in 1944. He is the author of nine novels and one collection of short stories, including Kruger’s Alp, which won the Whitbread Prize for Fiction, Serenity House, which was shortlisted for the 1992 Booker Prize, and My Mother’s Lovers, published by Atlantic Books in 2006 to great acclaim. He is also a poet and playwright and author of the celebrated memoir White Boy Running.

‘Hope is an intelligent and gifted writer, with an eye for realistic detail and an incisive but fluent style that together gives substance to his allegory and complement his mordant wit. . . Kruger’s Alp is a testament to that dream of a justice long deferred.’ New York Times

‘Although its theme is black, this is an extremely attractive book, witty and fast-moving and densely imagined as it moves with Blanchaille, an ex-priest, from South African townships, prisons and churches to London, equally rich in grotesques and violence. By the last pages the divide between fantasy and documentary has become brilliantly uncertain, and Mr Hope has established himself as a considerable talent.’ Sunday Times

‘Christopher Hope’s South Africa in Kruger’s Alp inclines much more to comedy than tragedy, but it’s mordant without being farcical. . . Hope writes it all down with ferocious tongue-in-cheek, a vision of his country which he seems able to endure only by laughing at it.’ Observer

‘Christopher Hope handles the serious business of life in white South Africa with black humour. . . Hope has given South African literature a new injection of life. Kruger’s Alp is more than a satirical fantasy, it is the story of a summit in self-deception. It is an iconoclast’s delight.’ The Star (Johannesburg)

ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER HOPE

FICTION

My Mother’s LoversA Separate DevelopmentThe Hottentot RoomMy Chocolate RedeemerSerenity HouseDarkest EnglandMe, the Moon and Elvis PresleyHeaven Forbid

SHORTER FICTION

Black SwanLearning to FlyThe Love Songs of Nathan J. SwirskyThe Garden of Bad Dreams

POETRY

Cape DrivesIn the Country of the Black PigEnglish Men

FOR CHILDREN

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

NON-FICTION

White Boy RunningMoscow! Moscow!Signs of the HeartBrother Under the Skin

FOR MIKE KIRKWOODWho showed me the gaps in the laager

First published in Great Britain in 1984 by William Heinemann Ltd.

This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2009 byAtlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

Copyright © Christopher Hope 1984

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 Acts 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. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

The quotation by President Kruger (page 72) is taken from The Memoirs of Paul Kruger (Negro University Press, New York, 1969).

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

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

ISBN: 978 1 84887 163 2eISBN: 978 1 78239 735 9

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic BooksAn imprint of Grove Atlantic LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondonWC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Contents

Also by Christopher Hope

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

Pray, did you never hear what happened to a man some time ago of this town (whose name was Christian) that went on a Pilgrimage up towards the higher regions?

John BunyanPilgrim’s Progress

They took the hill (Whose hill? What for?)But what a climb they left to do!Out of that bungled, unwise warAn alp of unforgiveness grew.

William Plomer‘The Boer War’

We knew nothing of the theatrical element which is part of all revolutionary movements in France, and we believed sincerely in all we heard.

A. HerzenChildhood, Youth and Exile

CHAPTER 1

As I walked through the wilderness of what remained of the world of Father Lynch and his ‘little guild’, I saw much to disturb me. Here was the last vestige of the parish garden where the bulldozers, earth-movers, grabbers and cranes had frozen into that peculiar menacing immobility giant machines assume when switched off; left as if stunned, open-mouthed, gaping at the human foolishness of wishing to stop work when they are strong and willing to continue. They stood silent, it being Sunday, resting from their merciless preparation of this new site for one of the enormous hostels of the huge University of National Christian Education, widely declared to be the largest in the southern hemisphere. I looked around me and found the work nearly complete. However, the machines had stopped eating for the moment; ours is a holy land and even the destruction of redundant churches halts on the Sabbath.

The advance of the university over the years had been slow but inexorable; at first, parcels of the extensive grounds of St Jude’s had gone and, wisely, Lynch had not fought against this but had preserved his energies for guarding the church itself and his garden. His community of priests and lay brothers had been whittled away one by one. Bishop Blashford had conducted negotiations with the university so as to safeguard what he called ‘an orderly withdrawal’, with a skill which had won him the admiration of municipal councils across the country – and the commendation of the Papal Nuncio, Agnelli.

I stood in the destroyed church with the gaping roof. All religious ornaments had been removed, the sentimental paintings of lambs in emerald meadows, the wooden stations of the cross, the stained-glass windows of obscure martyrs, the baptismal font, the giant crucifix which had swung above the altar, the doors of the confessionals torn off so that now the little chambers gaped like disused lavatories. All gone – the golden tabernacle, the candles, the altar stone, the plaster Virgin in her sky-blue drapery and her brass circlet of stars, the wooden St Joseph with his surprising paunch, his bluff good looks and his blue sea-captain’s eyes; all the gaudy, inappropriate prints of Italianate saints, all gone; the ruby glass altar lamps in which the tiny flame glowed perpetually, the wooden altar rail at which Blanchaille had stood with his boat boy, Mickey the Poet, beside him, fumigating the first few rows of the congregation with pungent incense, the sacred cardboard hosts that stuck to the roof of the mouth for half an hour after Communion, the chalices, the sweet and rather yeasty smell of the cheap Jewish wine Lynch favoured for the Mass, the ciborium, the copes and chasubles stiff with gold thread, all the intoxicating plumage by which ordinary, irritable, balding men transformed themselves into birds of paradise and paraded to the strangely comforting sound of brass bells; all the absurdly delightful foreign paraphernalia with which a diminishing band of Catholics in a not very notable parish chimed, chanted, blessed and perfumed the start of each bright indifferent African morning. Only the pews remained now, the dark, polished mahogany pews, on the last two of which, at the rear of the church, I could make out still, small oblong patches of lighter wood where the brass plates had been; they were marked RESERVED, thus delicately designating the seats for the handful of black servants who used this church until Father Lynch had the plates removed, in the face of considerable opposition, in the days when these things were regarded as perfectly normal and fully in accord with the will of God and the customs of the country.

I saw that only Father Lynch’s favourite tree, from beneath which the dying master of altar boys once conducted his famous picnics, was still standing. The Tree of Heaven, we called it, or Ailanthus altissima Father Lynch taught with desperate pedantry. Like Buddha, beneath the sacred Bo tree, Father Lynch sat – though there had been nothing Eastern about Father Lynch, who was small, thin and elfish and who told his boys that the name of the tree was highly misleading since its male flowers smelt pretty damn awful and its roots were a threat to the foundations of the church. It was beneath this Tree of Heaven that I lay down around noon and slept. And while I slept I dreamed.

In my dream I saw Theodore Blanchaille and he was not particularly well-dressed. But then he’d always been rather a sloppy character, old Blanchie, or Father Theodore Blanchaille as we learnt to refer to him, or Father Theo of the Camps, as he was known in the old days, or plain Mr Blanchaille as we must refer to him now, I suppose. He was wearing an old pair of khaki shorts, baggy, creased and much too big for him, and a weird kind of sailor’s top of jagged dark blue stripes, squared at the neck. He was barefoot and sat in an empty room on a plastic chair. He was a big fellow carrying too much weight, but then he’d always been heavy, and I could see his belly pushing at the thin cotton shirt, and the plastic bands of the garden chair he sat in pressed against his lower back and made rolls of flesh protrude, meaty and tubular, stacked one above the other like bales of cloth. He was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and reading a paper which was on the floor in front of him and turning the pages with his bare toes. He was holding a can of beans and occasionally he’d spoon a few of these into his mouth. No ordinary spoon this, but a square-tongued sugar spoon, silver-plated and made for the last visit of their Royal Majesties, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, whose crowned heads in blue enamel tilted lovingly together above their coat of arms. As he read he wept and the tears landed on his knees and ran down the thick hair of his legs and stained the newspaper.