Novel Extracts

A few years ago I completed a short novel titled 2704: Green and Pleasant Land. I have yet to find a publisher, and I think it still needs some careful "tinkering", but you might like to read a few extracts.

To place the chapters below in some context, here is a brief synopsis:

Rohan Thompson is about to make a long-anticipated move from Johannesburg to Cape Town when his car, containing all of his worldly possessions, is stolen. Shortly afterwards, he recognises a unique t-shirt of sentimental value to him and accidentally intercepts the trail of the stolen goods. He makes a clumsy attempt at tracking the thieves down, but his vigilante justice backfires, and he ends up being dumped in the middle of the Karoo. He is thus thrown into a journey to Cape Town that is very different to the one he had originally planned, taking him on a circular route via the highways, back roads and railways of the Eastern Cape, Pietermaritzburg and Bloemfontein. He is befriended, guided and challenged by two enigmatic characters that he meets along the way: Anna-Maria van Staden and Lukanyo Ngubane. For Rohan, an average English-speaking-whiteboy who is aware of his problematic place in South Africa but hasn’t quite got it figured out yet, the brief road trip becomes a voyage of discovery in both familiar and unfamiliar territory.



CHAPTER ONE

- Ma gents, I'm telling you, it's easy pickings. Easy. I could bloody push it down the road and have it for myself if the handbrake wasn't on … because of that, I need your help. And because I’m a good man to his friends, you know what I'm saying? Something tasty for all three of us.
- And it's fully loaded?
- The whole back seat, clothes, hi-fi, CDs, everything.
- Haai, man, not me, I'm not in.
- Why not man? You scared?   
- I'm not scared, but I'm not stupid either. I haven't forgotten last time, ne? When you two and Fly crammed in the front and guess who was left running after a car with a surfboard in the back and the bloody childlock on the back door? Not again, my brothers. Not when this brother gets two cops on his back and three broken ribs and four months to think about it on my own while you get all the women you want with your flashy clothes and an extra cut. Look at you two, like two bloody murungus with your cellphones and all this. Aikona, I didn't break out just to run back to prison like a dog because my old friends have spent too long in the shebeen without me and now they want to drive home drunk in a stolen car! It's you who's gone stupid.
- You finished, Shakespeare? Or have you forgotten that we are south of the Limpopo? Murungu … Mugabe … No, this is about moola, my friend. And having a cellphone doesn't make you white. That was the bloody old New South Africa. 
- Eh, sorry comrade Mbeki. I forgot about your African Renaissance …
- Shut up both of you! Are we doing this job or not?
- I'm in.
- No guns?
- Only one. Just in case.
- Okay, I'm in.

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CHAPTERS FIVE AND SIX

FIVE

So here I am, here you are, let’s talk. Or I’ll talk, and you listen - that’s how it works. I call the shots. Excuse me while I snigger at that unfortunate pun. At least we criminals have a sense of humour. We need to laugh every now and then; the power and money and violence of organised crime is a serious business. Haven’t you ever watched one of those gangster movies? I laugh at you as I ask that question - you imagine me now as a big black Godfather. Don’t worry, it’s much worse than that.
        I notice you met some of my acquaintances earlier. No doubt you thought they were the bad guys; sure, they steal, they cheat, but they would not kill you for the R100 in your wallet or purse. They’re small fish, practically the good guys. I know, because I’m one of the bad guys. Does that make you uncomfortable? Does it make you excited? Does it make you mad that I have the balls to talk to you like this? 

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CHAPTERS ELEVEN TO THIRTEEN

(Note: At this stage of the novel, Rohan’s attempt to track down his stolen possessions has backfired. He is beaten and dumped in the Karoo, where a local family, the Van Stadens, look after him. He befriends Anna-Maria Van Staden, a headstrong, intelligent young woman about to leave for Cape Town to start her university studies, and they arrange to drive down together.)


ELEVEN

They didn’t speak much during the first hour of driving. The mellow tones of songs from the Travis album The Invisible Band, slightly warped by the combined effect of a stretched tape and an old cassette player, nevertheless made excellent driving music. Much more road-trippy than a CD. Listening to one of the tracks, “Side”, Rohan noticed for the first time that the distinct cry of seagulls and surf could be heard in the background. He thought of wildlife documentaries; the seagull cries were gentle and calm but somehow not free, not swooping and shrieking and climbing to fall into the freedom of flight and noise and sea below as seagulls should. Somehow artificial. But still beautiful. It made his head swirl with the confusion of their conversation from the previous day. Then the tape reached the end of its reel, turned automatically from Side A to Side B, and a very different kind of song started playing, much more upbeat, lots of guitar strumming. The Bear Naked Ladies, “Never is enough”. Rohan knew it well from his university days, and loved it. But he heard the lyrics now as if for the first time.      
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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

(Note: In the preceding chapters, Rohan accepts an offer from Luke to stay with his family near Pietermaritzburg. The two strike up a lively friendship, and Luke shows Rohan a part of South Africa and a way of life that is entirely new to him. After a near run-in with Smallboy, the owner of the “link”, Rohan is scared off, and decides to take the train back to Cape Town via Bloemfontein. As a parting gift, Luke hands him a book titled Green and Pleasant Land, an obscure futuristic novel - using sources as diverse as William Blake and Steve Biko - in which current world power and wealth structures are inverted. Rohan reads two chapters of this book; they are quoted in the text. Then, soon after arriving in Cape Town, Rohan sees his stolen car and is sucked back into his vigilante crusade. Once again, he is hopelessly out of his depth, but this time the consequences are fatal.)


Dying, inevitably, slowly, bleeding heavily from the bullet wound in his shoulder and with both his legs, he was sure, agonisingly, broken; his ribs crushed, his head bruised and cut and dizzy; dying, Rohan lay thinking to himself, Well, maybe my life was a B-grade action movie after all.
    But his 20-metre fall had been no stunt. When the gun exploded at his back and the bullet seared into his flesh, he had felt only the sickening vibrations of his shoulder blade shattering. For a moment, a moment of shock and not-quite-belief, it was nothing more than a strange tingling sensation. Then the pain came. Suddenly gulping, panting for breath, gasping, staggering left and right as he heard one, two, three more rounds fired, bullets ricocheting off the boulders around him, bewildered, he lost all direction, up, down, gone. His legs exhausted, his feet with no sensation, the unfelt ground gave way beneath him even as he stumbled, disappearing below his eyes and then above his head as he fell, a heavy weight, clutching at nothing desperately, and fell, the bright sun hurling him down -
        And then, nothing.
        And now he lay, inevitably, slowly, he knew, dying.
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