Michiel Heyns is well-known as author, translator and academic. Here he tells more about his latest book, Each Mortal Thing.

‘As a writer who regards himself as a realist, I am interested in the capacity of the concrete details of the setting to represent certain non-material values.’

In an exchange of letters with Paul Auster (collected in Here and Now, Penguin 2014), JM Coetzee claims to be ‘afflicted with a peculiar kind of blindness’:

It’s not that I am incurious. On the contrary, everywhere I go my eyes are wide open. I am on the alert for signs. But the signs I pick up seem to have no general meaning. And the generalisability of the particular is the essence of realism, is it not? I have in mind realism as a way of seeing the world and recording it in such a way that particulars, though captured in all their uniqueness, seem yet to have meaning, to belong to a coherent system.

I would not want to discuss the validity or otherwise of this as a comment on Coetzee’s work; but as a writer who regards himself as a realist, I am interested in this view of realism: the generalisability of the particular, in other words, the capacity of the concrete details of the setting to represent certain non-material values.

In my recently published novel Each Mortal Thing, the city of London acquires, I think, something of the status of a centre of value. I imagined the city in the first place merely as a setting for my story, which centres on a young South African expat living in London. But the conjunction of setting and character automatically creates a certain tension between the South African and the city he finds himself in: he is probably more conscious of the city than a London native would be. Thus, walking from Oxford Street to Russell Square, he registers the different feel of different parts of the city:

As he emerged from the relative calm of Wells Street into the clamour of Oxford Street, with its fug of exhausted air, the heat fuming from the tacky tarmac even early in the day, he wished he could shut down his senses: he didn’t want to hear the street, smell it, see it, feel it on his bare skin, know it. All he wanted was to retreat into a cocoon of insensibility until he reached breathable air or an open prospect. […]
He walked as fast as the crush on Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road permitted. As he entered the airier environment of Bedford Square and the British Museum, he felt he could breathe easier: the class structure of British society extended to its urban spaces.

Later, returning by train to London from an outing to the calmer spaces of Cambridge, he compares the two places:

The train was pulling into King’s Cross in one of its least welcoming modes, besieged by wet, hungry, tired commuters, crowding each other while waiting for platform announcements, shouldering each other aside once the magic figure had flashed onto the board. […] The chill fresh silence of the Fellows’ Garden seemed a world away: this, this crush and press of humanity, was life in the city he had chosen to inhabit.

These passages are of course incidental to the action of the novel and its characters. But they seem to me instances of what Coetzee means by ‘realism as a way of seeing the world and recording it in such a way that particulars, though captured in all their uniqueness, seem yet to have meaning, to belong to a coherent system.’

Of course, the ‘coherent system’ is the whole of the rest of the novel, which is not really about London at all, and yet is inextricably conditioned by it, as our lives are conditioned by the surroundings we may not even be conscious of.

Each Mortal Thing is out now.

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This article was originally published in The Penguin Post, a magazine about books for book lovers from Penguin Random House South Africa.   

Categories Fiction South Africa

Tags Each Mortal Thing Michiel Heyns Penguin Random House SA The Penguin Post