Exploring the secret history of her South African family

 
She Left Me The Gun: My Mother’s Life Before Me by Emma Brockes (
pr
22 March 2013

She Left Me The Gun: My Mother’s Life Before Me
by Emma Brockes
(Faber, £16.99)

Emma Brockes’s journey to South Africa to uncover the secrets of her mother’s incestuous childhood at the hands of an alcoholic father has secured pre-publication praise from the likes of Zoë Heller and Blake Morrison.

So I began this memoir with high hopes, not least because I grew up in Johannesburg and hoped it might also shed light on the white South African male psyche as the world ponders the actions of another white South African, Oscar Pistorius, soon to stand trial for the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.

The book is billed as “part investigation, part travelogue, part elegy”, a genre epitomised by the 1990 autobiographical masterpiece by Rian Malan, My Traitor’s Heart.

Brockes, an award-winning Guardian journalist, starts with elegant understatement, casually dropping in that her grandfather had “previous” when he married her apparently unsuspecting grandmother. “I assume they were happy and that my grandmother didn’t know about her husband’s murder conviction,” she writes. “Which is a shame. It would have been useful information to have had when, as she lay dying, she was deciding whom to leave my two-year-old mother with.”

By the end of chapter one, we know also that Brockes’s grandfather had sexually abused several of his daughters, including her mother Paula.

As soon as Paula dies, Brockes, then 28, catches the next plane to South Africa to begin the process of trawling through court records and interviewing her remaining uncles and aunts — with a little sightseeing thrown in for good measure.

What follows is a bit like those tedious 24-hour car journeys from Johannesburg to Cape Town: the end packs a punch but you have to cross the endlessly mundane Great Karoo desert to get there. Her interactions with her mother’s strange siblings throw up too few revelations to draw the reader in but are nevertheless recounted at length. No doubt she would have benefited from a stronger editor at Faber.

Not only does Brockes offer little insight into the country of her ancestors, beyond a clichéd distaste for white South Africans, but — unforgivable, this — she shows the journalistic courage of a gnat. She hires a driver with an air-conditioned BMW to chauffeur her about. But when she gets to the address where her mother once lived in central Johannesburg and the driver intimates it’s a dangerous place and says, “I don’t think you should get out”, Brockes’s pathetic response is: “Okay. Let’s go.”

The book never rises above its own subject matter, which is a pity because Brockes can be funny and observant. But her ignorance leads to a moment of singular bad taste when, after visiting the Anglo-Zulu battlefields as a tourist, she appears to scoff at the murder of the famous historian David Rattray — purely, it seems, because he was white and she has no idea of the legacy he left for all races.

At the end, Brockes herself peruses her notebooks and observes: “Either it will cohere at some point … or be an odd thing I did once that made no difference at all.” It doesn’t quite cohere, but a poignant portrait of a family ravaged by incest emerges. Like the arresting title, which turns out to be a bit of a fudge, She Left Me the Gun promises more than it delivers.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £13.99, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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