This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

17th November 2007

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Primary Coloured: A Novel of Politics
Brent Meersman
(Human & Rousseau)

Brent Meersman hasn’t taken any chances. Readers who can’t quite figure out – after making their way through the 400 pages of his debut novel – why its fictional characters seem so familiar, can punch in the web address printed on the back cover. It’s the book’s blog. There they will find, amongst other things, a link to the Wikipedia entry for roman à clef: “French for ‘novel with a key’. A novel describing real-life events behind a façade of fiction.” Included in the list of examples is Primary Colours, Joe Klein’s book (later a movie starring John Travolta and Emma Thompson) about Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, from which Primary Coloured takes its punning title and narrative premise.

The “coloured” in question is Charlene Kennedy, former member of the PAC and founder of the Social Democrats (SD) as an alternative opposition party to the ANC, hoping to replace the ineffectual, corrupt and overly bourgeois official opposition, the Conservative Alliance (CA). She is not quite running for president, but spends most of the novel on the road trying to conjure up support for her fledgling organisation during the three months prior to a South African general election.

Ring any bells? Yes, Ms Kennedy is Patricia de Lille, leader of the Independent Democrats (ID). The author himself features prominently in the novel in the person of Joel Moritz, “theatre producer turned campaign manager for the SD” – Meersman is an established performing arts critic who, in 2004, made a foray into politics as (you guessed it) campaign manager for the ID.

There are various other characters who have their provenance in the real world. Many of them are not particularly likeable, and some are even involved in illegal activities; certain inept members of the SD/ID seem to be scrounging a political livelihood off Kennedy/De Lille’s achievements and tainting her idealism, while the CA (it’s the DA, stupid) seems comprised mostly of cheating, bribing, thieving career politicians who will do anything to protect and consolidate the scraps left over after the ANC has secured most of the vote.

This perhaps explains Meersman’s choice of the roman à clef genre – it provides him with a chance to bad-mouth those whom he encountered in the grubby world of party politics without the risk of litigation for libel. It also allows him to taunt DA apparatchiks by giving them silly names: Archibald Patchett is the CA’s chief whip, Aryan Hancock their poncy but slimy campaign manager (Tony Leon is, rather unimaginatively, renamed Tony Katz).

These advantages notwithstanding, the novel’s form actually prevents it from offering anything new to the reader. Primary Colours portrayed the “intrigue behind the scenes” in America’s corridors of power – personalities and events that had remained hidden from the public view in the United States. There’s plenty of cloak-and-dagger in South African politics, too, but nothing in Primary Coloured could be described as a “revelation”. Whether it’s because our investigative journalists are super-sharp, or our politicians too lazy to cover their tracks, or both, we are well aware of how low political operators in this country stoop, have stooped and will continue to stoop.

Meersman doesn’t see this as problematic. In fact, his blog details in a somewhat self-congratulatory manner the overlap between the novel’s “fiction” and contemporary “fact”: spy scandals, government overspending on entertainment and marketing, attempts to gag the press and so on. But this is not a credit to the novel so much as a redundant indication of how South African politics is a soap opera with fatal consequences on a national scale. I’m generally not one to advocate “life writing” (there are far too many biographies and autobiographies in circulation), but in this case I think I’d rather have the author’s thoughts and experiences without the veil of fiction.

Meersman is a colourful and opinionated figure who has straddled the worlds of politics, business, media and the creative arts – he certainly has insights to offer – and, as a writer, he’s no obvious rookie. If this is not an altogether successful first novel, it’s not because of the writing per se. The prose is relatively crisp, the dialogue fairly believable, the characters mostly well drawn and the plot ambitiously wide in scope (it even incorporates the mysterious death of double-dealing mining magnate Roman Grebe, aka Brett Kebble). The novel also covers a lot of geographical terrain: the political institutions are in Cape Town and Pretoria, but Kennedy’s campaign trail takes her from the rural Eastern Cape to Mpumalanga to the North West.

De Lille has been an important voice in South African oppositional politics, and Kennedy is a flattering portrait; though moody, she is charismatic, down-to-earth and occasionally very eloquent. Certainly, she is convincing when she reminds potential voters that “there were many liberation movements ... the ANC are not the sole owners of the struggle” and excoriates would-be abusers of power (perhaps Kennedy is even more credible than De Lille; there’s plenty of party infighting in Primary Coloured, but there are no “we have been vindicated!” speeches).

Ultimately, however, this reviewer is not persuaded that the political world of the novel – though no doubt important – is really that interesting.