PUBLISHER: Pidgeon Press
ISBN: 978-1177906-144-7
Reviewed By Philani A. Nyoni
This isn’t your typical Eppel. If you were hoping for something like the biting political commentary of his last two offerings in the novel form namely Traffickings and the inimitable Absent: The English Teacher you’re wrong and nobody’s going to offer you an apology. It’s as good as any Eppel, even though the southpaw went left of expectation.
If this book is like anything Eppel has written before, that would be his debut: DGG Berry’s Great North Road. Our protagonist this time around is also a loner, like DGG, and the author goes back to his childhood home: Collen Bawn and makes it clear from the first page. Tom, the protagonist, comes into the house from a fishing expedition at the dam “situated between the village and the Great North Road”. This is in the 1950’s, so this is a piece of historical fiction, a great one at that. The first section is set in Rhodesia, the second ‘book’, The Meddling Seventies is set in London.
The Boy Who Loved Camping opens with this a neat line: “Dad was on the veranda playing darts with the cat”. Eppel has been absurd before, he once stopped a book’s villains by reminding them that he is the author and they are just characters, so they could play nice or face the eraser, or something like that. With such a rich history of strange, I must say I wasn’t quite sure where that opening was going: was the cat also throwing darts or was the cat the… darts?
Eppel is a master of humour, which I suppose is a prerequisite for the fine art of satyr and this offering does not disappoint. The humour starts with the cat-playing darts and pops up so often, driving the story page after page. Ouma and her lager-loving is a constant spring. There are names like Van Bastárd whose ludicrousness cannot be disguised by the accent on his name, only magnified, a Handlebars, and Mr. Musgrave who teaches his pupils that the Zimbabwe Ruins were built by slaves to house slaves.
I suppose an entire thesis can be written about Mr. Musgrave. He insists that he does not err in this farcical assertion because he has a degree from the University of Sterling, hence his word is law. One could drone on (in the fashion of academia) about how academia hijacks narratives and imposes its opinions on them on the sheer basis of them being propounded by academia. One could turn pages and pages on revisionism; history being told by the conqueror and often used to demean the conquered.
Musgrave is an essential window into a place and time of consolidating Settler power. Musgrave, to me at least, represents the mass murder of a generation (say his name slowly). He’s a wacky character with a wacky name (come on, it’s an Eppel novel) who reads between the lines as a paedophile. The greatest harm he does is in the classroom, to the minds of his students. He is the personification of baneful whiteness, a constant theme in this offering most often represented by snow. By accepting his teachings, which they must because he is their master, Musgrave’s student’s inherit prejudice, a superiority complex over the very people who make their day-to-day lives easier. Like the evangelists of Hatchings, he justifies the subjugation of the natives in a humorously absurd way.
Eppel is brave to create a character like this, these are the kind of characters that make it easy to label him racist. It is, in my preferred wording, ‘Patriot fodder’, (named for The Patriot’s reviewers who flaunt tone-deafness with every available syllable) because it is easy (read lazy) to take a character’s words and put them in the author’s mouth. Is God atheist because I speak blasphemy?
Characters like this are a clue into racist psyche, and beyond. Much deeper, Musgrave lampoons all of us who feed our prejudices: racial, tribal, political, xenophobic, religious et al, all the poison of stigma and propaganda, to the next generation. Perhaps to the more sensitive this truth is easier to swallow when the biting satire sketches a white man, unlike in Absent: The English Teacher where the ‘humbug’ he was exposing was that of ‘majority rule’ (as the state capturer prefers to euphemise the euthanasia of decency).
I think The Boy Who Loved Camping is Eppel’s strongest commentary on race so far, at least in prose. There have been great poems to that effect like (my darling favourite) Song Of The Mukiwa Tree and others scattered in his various works, most notably in O Suburbia!. This time it isn’t as black and white as he has often done; the veteran literary pugilist has switched stance to southpaw.
Eppel is a technician, and a master of the Laws, precisely that of Antonyms, or as he prefers to call it, ‘the necessity of opposites’. He will tell you that ‘it takes light to cast a shadow’. His humour is the light that casts the shadow of sorrow as the novel progresses into the second part. The gloom and snow of London is representative of Tom’s agony when tragedy befalls him and he’s forced to move to England. All that laughter and absurdity brings us closer to Tom’s pain through juxtaposition.
My biggest takeaway is the idea of ‘belonging’. In a world with choruses of cultural appropriation, building walls and other forms of xenophobia, fascism and nationalism (the other kind) rearing their heads, The Boy Who Loved Camping is a light and the shadow asks: does one really belong in a place because they were born there? Maybe Tom doesn’t belong in Rhodesia, what about in England where the colour of his skin makes him part of the majority? What does it mean to truly belong?
