Five years ago, Masande Ntshanga published “The Reactive”, a debut novel which I can now conjecture was an act of existential exorcism, purging the writer of the semi-autobiographical details which stood in the way of his more compelling coming-of-age adventure, “Triangulum”. If you think about the first novels of young authors, they often work as wish-fulfilment fantasies which complete the imperfect years of their young adulthoods, offering up a pristine vision that transcends the scrappy realities of a life lived the first time around. All the fragments can be sutured together into a transcendental whole in the realm of imagination. “The Reactive” answers to this principle, offering the reader a world of burnt-out glamour and romanticised self-destruction. The protagonists are mortally and cosmically damned. They are cut adrift from morality into a cycle of abusing drugs, exploiting the vulnerable, and relinquishing their responsibilities, one by one. But even as they circle the drain of history, these nihilistic orphans of the born-free era seem to be having an effortlessly cool time.
“The Reactive”, therefore, will appeal most strongly to the upper campus menagerie, the undergrads and postgrads of the Humanities. One should recall that the average graduate literature department, for example, is the place where society’s educated rejects and misfits congregate: here, closet anorexics, depressives, narcissists, autistics and fatalists use their dissertations as a form of rogue psychotherapy in which to redeem their own personal pathologies by politicising them. It is no surprise that one discovers a great deal of left-leaning messianic idealism among these individuals. In the millennium after our forebears committed deicide, these children replace the spiritual tonics of god and temple with those of Marxism, feminism, “decoloniality”, and various other species of surrogate Manichaeism, in which the victims secretly turn out the be the champions of history. And thus does this group of rag-tag exiles transform their own morbid symptoms into a narrative of hidden heroism.
“The Reactive” was, despite its concessions to an undergrad romanticism, a signal moment in South African literature. Much like Sibs Shongwe-La Mer’s “Necktie Youth”, its cinematic parallel in this respect, it offered up a glimpse of a new generation of young middle-class black artists trying to make sense of the sinister largesse of South African history, whether socio-political or psychosexual. It augured a new season in our culture. “The Reactive” is, in my opinion, principally a technical showpiece demonstrating Ntshanga’s immense talent at the level of the sentence. One thinks here of the evocative power of such phrases as “bilge cleaving the water like a scalpel through skin,” or “eyes glassy with glaucoma, each orb like a marble spinning in wet earth.” In that novel, the sky seemed especially tactile; reading it again, I can feel it against my skin, cold and glutinous, like the threads of amniotic fluid that cling to Neo when he wakes up in the postapocalyptic reality outside the Matrix.
Five years later, “Triangulum” is like a gestalt work that summons all these raw aptitudes into a splendid coalescence. I am grateful that Ntshanga has emerged from the transitional ritual of “The Reactive” an altogether better writer, with a stronger sense of plot, a more natural rhythm to his dialogue, and a new minimalism which allows him to compact his usual existential intensities into leaner sentences. He has left behind the meandering plotlessness of much of “The Reactive” to chart different territory in the genre of philosophical science-fiction. Set during the ‘90s and early 2000s, the narrator, a savant teenage girl, finds herself visited by an extra-terrestrial force appearing to her in the primordial shape of a triangle. Around the same time, a number of disappearances of neighbourhood high-school girls make its way into the newspapers and the narrator begins to speculate whether these are connected with the vanishing (or as she believes, “abduction”) of her own mother a few years prior. A great sense of mystery prevails over these pages as the narrator, together with her two closest friends, sets out to discover the truth of these serial disappearances. For the reader, there is an intriguing invitation to sleuthy pattern-forming on offer here: is our darling narrator suffering delusional hallucinations, are these otherworldly interventions a symptom of her bereavement, is there a rather more mortal cause behind the abductions? Ntshanga draws us into the enigma of a deeper intergenerational conspiracy involving warring factions, distant betrayals, vengeful parents, a whole shadow history which wonderfully blurs the borderline between science fiction and political reality.
And in-between all of this, there is a heartfelt coming-of-age drama involving best friends undergoing all the loveliest teenage rituals, from first kisses and same-sex experimentation, to investing the everyday with occult power the way we could do so fantastically when we were younger. These first 200 pages of the novel (“The Machine”) were so compelling I read them on a single, chilly afternoon in late July. I felt myself slipping back in time to when I was twelve or thirteen and went through a feverish season of devouring Stephen King paperbacks from our school library. “Triangulum” shares with Stephen King’s best books, like the mammoth thousand-pager “It” from 1986, the quality of revealing the adventurous, questing dimension that lies beneath childhood self-discovery. The novel is replete with delightful pop-culture references from the ‘90s: I certainly remember desperately trying to decrypt Colonel Campbell’s instruction to look for Meryl’s codec frequency on the back of the CD case in “Metal Gear Solid”, which took me about a good week as I didn’t realise Hideo Kojima had such a talent for bursting through the fourth-wall; elsewhere, Koholint Island from “Zelda: Link’s Awakening” becomes a suitable comparison-point for Plato’s allegory of the cave; and then there is Eifel 65, the Vengaboys, “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” and the Bloodhound Gang…
It is not simply the pop-cultural artefacts of a bygone era that Ntshanga exhumes here, but rather a whole generational experience that, without an eagle-eyed chronicler, might have suffered obscurity and then disappeared altogether, leaving behind only our unreliable memories to provide testimony of another epoch in the life of this country. He has a great skill for overlaying centuries-old historical detail into the mundane facts of South African life. When the narrator and her father drive past a colonial monument to Queen Victoria in the Eastern Cape, she remembers: “… watching through the car window as the queen slid past us, frozen in another century, looking over a population that was kept in the dark about how much blood she’d spilt. It didn’t feel like a prison, but the remains of an alien civilisation which had now fled, its mission untenable; but not wanting to be forgotten, it had left behind unreadable signs, as out of place as hieroglyphs inside an igloo.”
Then, abruptly, we are slung forward in time, arriving in the year 2025 to the scene of a dystopian Johannesburg lingering just outside the grasp of our own experiences. Our narrator has grown up and is now part of an altogether new adventure: this time, immersed in the worlds of corporate espionage and surveillance, eco-terrorist cells and double-crossing digital infiltrators. As a matter of courtesy, we must pause here and give a shout-out to Ms. Lauren Beukes who, as far as I’m aware, was one of the earliest writers to draw out the sci-fi potential lurking beneath the Jo’burg skyline with “Zoo City”. Let’s not forget all the snobby intellectuals who were having none of it at the time (2010), and are now being made to eat the crumpled paper their criticisms were written on, as the genre begins to proliferate across the continent. In Ntshanga’s version, we are given another vertical and jagged metropolis, besieged by inequality and corruption. The action here is slick and cinematic, with an almost script-writerly sense for dialogue. This section of the work (“Five Weeks in the Plague”) is a gripping thriller, no doubt, but never manages to ascend to same level of masterful intimacy found in the earlier half. My attention began to falter somewhere around the time the book began lurching and sputtering towards its conclusion, jumping across timelines, passing over decade-long intermissions, switching formats from up-close first-person to synoptic remembrances and then back again.
Let’s call this weakness in mystery novels and movies, the “Shutter Island Effect”. The more grandiose and elaborate the setup, the thinner the tightrope upon which the author has to balance in the final act. More often than not, it is impossible to find a resolution that will match the scale of the adrenalised curiosity dredged up during the gambit, and “Triangulum” is no exception to this. So, the ending left me disappointed, but ultimately hopeful. Despite the shortcomings detailed above, Ntshanga has once again demonstrated an exceptional skill and I have faith that his third outing, whenever it eventually crosses our horizon, will be the best one yet.