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Though
the author of this fable-like tale of power, Ceridwen Dovey,
hails from South Africa, the country portrayed in Blood
Kin is nameless. It is ruled by a president who has exposed
himself in unintentionally intimate ways to three of his staff,
who were hired only to cut his hair, prepare his food, and
paint his portrait. Though it begins with quotidian details,
such as the way the President liked to have his nose hairs
trimmed and the way the chef prepared abalones, the story
eventually takes as its focus the tangled web of power, which
has the insidious tendency to taint everyone it touches.
In her
debut novel, Dovey weaves a story reminiscent of the morally
incisive works of J.M. Coetzee. Unfortunately, the languid
voice and lack of dynamics in Blood Kin make this interesting
and ambitious tale less striking than it might have been.
"I apologize
for the unintended similarity of your situation to the children's
rhyme. What is it, butcher, baker, candlestick maker?" a character
called the Commander says to the three staff members twenty
pages into the story. But the inclusion of this reference
is intentional; the story is meant to read like a fable or
even a rhyme, with three alternating narrators, named simply
"his chef," "his portraitist," and "his barber." All three
are close to the president in seemingly mundane ways but become
much more deeply involved once the president is overthrown
by the Commander.
The action
of this sequence is relayed in the same fluid, calm voice
as the rest of the tale: "The bodyguards were shot with silenced
guns. They simply crumpled where they stood, like puppets
a child has lost interest in. The President's assistant, without
a word, opened my wardrobe, stepped into it, and closed the
mirrored door behind him quietly. It was only then that I
saw them: two masked gunmen, slick as spiders, with their
weapons trained on the President." This kind of bluntness
doesn't so much recall Hemingway as it does a description
of a set in a play. Even the book's shocking ending is told
in the same voice that describes how to prepare shellfish
or how to wash hair before cutting it.
The rest
of the story is a prolonged period of introspection, as the
three narrators are kept at a residence in another part of
the city, unable to leave. The focus becomes the female figures
in their lives, and more narrators named only by their relation
to the president— "his chef's daughter," for example—are
given voice. The problem with this technique, though not inherently
a weak or a strong one, is that Dovey has given the voices
no distinction whatsoever. Each sounds like the last, and
telling the characters apart becomes difficult because of
the lack of names.
The distinctive
characters may not be, ultimately, the point of the story,
anyway. All three staff members are "failed men" in some way—as
one (I can't remember which) puts it, "Having been failed
by my own flesh, and those of my flesh, what else can an old
man turn to except power to shore himself up, or at least
proximity to power?" This might be the main question the story
tries to consider. Are we born with an innate desire for power,
and a blindness toward its destructive power? Or, being surrounded
by corrupt power, would a person naturally internalize it,
and have no qualms carrying on its awful legacy? A third option
presented by the story might be that we compensate for failures
in our personal lives by seeking power over other people,
whether it be one person or two million. As Dovey's tree of
characters grow more and more interlocking branches, the widespread
lack of human decency is fully revealed.
The root
of our answer to this would seem to lie with those characters
who have the most power: the President and Commander. The
perception of the President changes throughout the novel—seen
as someone first so powerful and then so pitiful—but
by the time the story ends, readers still have not seen enough
to know who the President was. Just as the three of his servants
only knew bits of him—such as his hair or his food—readers,
too, know only scattered details and vague, secondhand tales.
He remains the absent center of this story, when knowing exactly
who this man was might have made the message—that we
each have some of the President in us—vastly more powerful.
(April,
2008)
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