Hard on the heels of my reading of Jane Caro's Accidental Feminists, comes an exploration of a mother-and-daughter relationship that exemplifies Caro's association of feminism with occasional inter-generational friction. When mother-daughter expectations about gender roles diverge, there can sometimes be mutual disappointment.

In Fiona Melrose's novel Johannesburg (2017) the central character Gin spends more time thinking about her role as a creative artist and a writer, than she does organising an important birthday party for her elderly mother. She is trying—and failing—to be a dutiful daughter, with a mother who doesn't understand her ambition. Since Gin doesn't think the domestic arts are important, her mother expects the party to be a debacle and her response is unkind and discouraging. But there are two sides to this coin: Gin's choices impact on her mother — who had no choice in them at all.

Would her mother be kinder if Gin had simply complied, married some local man, set up a house, spent her days choosing soft furnishings, teaching art at the local primary school? Gin had a sense that this would have allowed her mother to settle into some sense of comfort, achievement, objective standard by which she could announce her own parenting, and her daughter's life, a success. Instead Gin had asked her mother to navigate an alien set of credentials. Difficult to quantify, impossible to justify when all around were simply toeing the line. By refusing to conform, Gin had forced her mother to do the same. She had forced her to defend something she didn't believe in. (p.104)

Johannesburg is a contemporary reworking of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, set on a single day in Johannesburg on the day that the death of Nelson Mandela was announced in December 2013. Gin (Virginia) has returned from her work as an artist to spend the day preparing for her mother Neve Brandt's 80th birthday party. Narrated in chorus of voices, the novel brings characters together across a colour and class divide that still persists in the New South Africa. It's a satisfying book that richly rewards attention to narrative strands that don't at first seem connected. (Pay attention to the dog Juno: Juno was the Roman goddess who protected the nation as a whole but also kept special watch over all aspects of women's lives!)

Death stalks the novel: Gin's wild adolescence in a lawless post-apartheid city, makes her preoccupied by death.

They were rainbow nights for the new Rainbow Nation, lawless and blood-full, so that all four chambers of her heart raged in unison. After dominating her childhood, it seemed as if the police were all but gone. While violent crime played out in suburbs and townships across the city in a way that made Gin fear her own breath in the dark. And there was no one there to save her, not her parents, not her friends. Certainly not [her unwanted suitor] Peter. So she embraced it. The whole city was an accident of death. This one was in the wrong place, that one, his time was up. A roll of the dice. Wrong house, wrong petrol station, wrong time and your day was done. Death was everywhere and came in every form. Just to be alive was dangerous and to survive a defiance. (p.65-6)

The irony is that privileged white people like Gin are still not in the same sort of peril as the black underclass, and she doesn't realise that until late in the novel.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/02/20/johannesburg-by-fiona-melrose/ ( )

The author uses the day of the death of Mandela's death to create a modern-day Mrs Dalloway. Gin is back from New York, preparing a party for her mother's 80th birthday, whilst her former boyfriend, Peter, tries to understand what has happened to his life, and a young disabled man gradually loses his sanity protesting outside Peter's building. I suspect there are lots of echoes of Mrs Dalloway here - I don't know the novel well enough to really appreciate them, I think. Melrose uses the Gin character to talk about the difficulties of leaving a place, returning, being yourself. She is a modern artist, but there is a lot there that could apply to a writer, I think, and I had autobiographical suspicions. The relationship between Gin and her mother is awful, and the wealthy white environment that Melrose conjures makes it easy to work out why anyone would leave. Peter is a bit of a pathetic character - does anyone moon over someone they never see for twenty years? The character of Saturday is just desperately sad: injured in a wildcat mine strike, he protests outside the mine company HQ every day, whilst his sister tries to keep his body and soul together despite a full time job. I'm not too sure what I thought about the idea of Mandela's death in the background - it makes for large set pieces, as the characters note the gatherings of people outside the family house (in Jo'burg), the newspapers' reaction, the comments of Peter's colleagues. I suspect this book suffered from me picking it up and putting it down again, but then again, perhaps that was because it really didn't grab me? ( )