Dangerous Verses

THE IMPOSTOR

By Damon Galgut

Black Cat. 249 pp. Paperback, $14

The South Africa in post-apartheid novels of writers such as J.M. Coetzee is populated by disillusioned idealists, corrupt schemers and covert racists; it is a world where the average white man occupies a tenuous place. Firmly entrenched in this tradition arrives Damon Galgut's new novel, The Impostor, the author's follow-up to The Good Doctor, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2003.

Just as Coetzee's Disgrace begins in a city and ends on a remote rural farm, so we find in The Impostor a disillusioned man named Adam Napier who has lost his job in Johannesburg to a black worker and has decamped to his brother's broken down country house. Alone there in the dry veldt, he intends to resume his long-interrupted career as a poet.

During his retreat, Adam runs into a peculiar fellow called Canning. He claims to have known "Nappy" from their school days, but Napier has no recollection of him. Canning is a blowsy, opportunistic entrepreneur who lives on a game preserve with Baby, his beautiful black wife (and a former prostitute) who seems to have little use for her husband. The three fall into an odd friendship that takes place against the surreal backdrop of a wilderness preserve, of lions feeding on raw meat and peacocks landing with a clatter on rooftops. Meanwhile, a developing attraction between Baby and "Nappy" eventually puts him in danger.

One is tempted to view these disparate characters as symbols of South Africa's new order, where social idealists chafe against money hustlers and both are in thrall to the true power-holders, the black leaders. But because the country resists easy categorization, Galgut seems obliged to explain it, ultimately in simplified terms. Initially, the self-loathing poet of The Impostor is hard to take, but eventually one succumbs to the author's command over every scene. His lambent prose irradiates the arid landscape, creating a palpable sense of eeriness. "The daylight seems perpetually fixed at noon," he writes. "On the hills outside town a fire breaks out and it burns for days, casting a pall of smoke across the sun, glowing red at night like a weird galaxy hanging low in the firmament."

This stark realism blended with dreaminess lends the narrative a fable-like quality that feels Kafkaesque. It's a tone well suited to a novel that has no clear moral theme but rather portrays a shadowy, changing world that poses more questions than it answers.

-- Joseph Olshan 's most recent novel, is "The Conversion."