Bryan Rostron

Macaulay Vogel’s life is defined by three things: his job as an archivist, his haven in the family home he has occupied since childhood, and his love for Marda – a fellow anti-apartheid activist who died nearly 25 years before.

His routine is rigid: he walks to Cape Town Castle every morning to organize and archive a recently discovered cache of secret police files, in the evenings he usually buys flowers to put in front of his photograph of Marda, he sees his mistress occasionally, and he and two friends climb Table Mountain every month.

When Macaulay finds his own surveillance files, his orderly life is turned upside down. His struggle work coding secret messages was a secret source of pride: he was a backroom boy but his ‘black petals’, as he called his encryptions, were essential in transmitting information.

He is shocked to discover the police knew his every shameful secret but dismissed him as a mere womanizer and drunkard, an irrelevance. The man portrayed in this detailed dossier is not anyone Vogel recognizes, and he begins to doubt himself and his memories.

When he questions old comrades about the pre-liberation days, his motives are misunderstood and he is suspected of trying to expose former police spies. Life-long friends suddenly abandon him – or warn him to leave the past alone: He is shown another and less honourable side to people whom he always thought he knew well.

Although Vogel is not pursuing a witch hunt against traitors to the cause who have risen to well-paid and influential positions in the new regime, the files do contain a wealth of explosive and compromising information he could use to discredit a wide range of former associates, all of whom are eager to retrieve their own potentially damaging reports.

“Why is it that before, in opposition, we believed that the truth would set us free… but now we are free at last, and in power, we quickly convince ourselves that it is the suppression of truth, in fact, that will keep us free?”

The book has a magical, surreal quality which becomes more and more marked until the reader, along with Macaulay himself, begins to wonder if this man is paranoid, delusional, or truly a target of faceless, implacable forces.

“Files have a life of their own,” Vogel says, half in jest, and as a professional archivist he knows written reports are always subjective, often inaccurate and sometimes contain deliberate and malicious lies. The longer the lies are hidden the more powerful they become, because proving the truth over the contemporary written word is almost impossible after enough time has passed.

Petals are central to the book: the delicate, dry, faintly scented petals of memory; the archival file pages are petal Macaulay tries to piece together to form the flower of his past; the black petals – the secret encrypted messages – he constructed; the Bougainvillea petals blown onto his kitchen floor, and the petals of the flowers he brings Marda.

Flowers for Marda… Phlox, roses, lilies – most of all, lilies, Tiger Lilies, Arum Lilies – huge armfuls of them bought several times a week and laid down in front of her photograph in the room with the perpetually drawn curtains, where they are left to wither and rot.

Fragrant, fresh, beautiful and delicate, the blooms are sacrificed at this private shrine and become nothing more, ultimately, than dead black petals.

Short but exquisite, literary but intriguing, contemporary but historical, mystical but relevant, this is one of the most intelligent and satisfyingly written South African novels I have read in a long time.

Our beloved country, free at last, is a cesspit of racism, corruption, hypocrisy, nepotism, betrayal and secrecy… What does an honest man do when trusted comrades are revealed as cynical self-servers, shamelessly exploiting causes for which thousands sacrificed their lives?

Macaulay Vogel was forced to reassess himself and his past when the secret files of his adversaries revealed him as an immoral drunk: others, with more to hide, are quick to sacrifice him to safeguard their own shameful and far more damning secrets.

An excellent portrayal of 21st Century Cape Town, hot, fiery and jaded: Black Petals is not a thriller but it is redolent with brooding suspense – fires rage on the slopes of the mountain that dominates the city, and the atmosphere is both literally and figuratively murky – as the archivist searches for answers…… (mehr)