‘The Lion Seeker’ by Kenneth Bonert

Reviewed by Hubert O’Hearn  (originally posted July 29, 2013)

The great theatre and film director Elia Kazan said in his brilliant autobiography A Life that “if anyone ever listed beforehand the thousand decisions that must be made in directing a play, no one would ever do it.” He was quite right in that assessment. Life in many ways is composed of a nearly endless series of choices, many of them of the rock or a hard place variety. In the case of the final choice, of course it is buried in dirt or tossed in a fire. Think of that one next time you’re frustrated with previewing condominium units.

Any given day is choice after choice after choice. Cereal or eggs? Bus or car to work? Work or Facebook? Facebook or Twitter? Leave, stay, or leave it all to fate and just watch television instead?

Kenneth Bonert’s novel The Lion Seeker has within its potentially toe-cracking 576 pages choice after choice after miserable choice. Sophie Zawistowska had one heartbreaking tough life call to make in William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice. Bonert’s creation, Isaac Helger, has them by the dozen. The fascinating thing about Isaac is that from the reader’s point of view he chooses incorrectly pretty much every time and yet he ends up pretty well by the end. (Oh hell, maybe it’s just me? Now I’m reconsidering everything I’ve done in the past thirty years. Novels, eh? Bloody hell.)

Isaac is the only son of Gitelle, a Jewish Lithuanian emigrant to South Africa, and Abel, a struggling watchmaker. Isaac has a sister Rively who is of absolute no importance to The Lion Seeker‘s narrative until the very end. I frankly wondered why Bonert had even included Rively except to avoid the caricature of Isaac being the maternally doted-upon only child. Instead, she is a character who serves as a plot device to reveal all at the end; an end by the way which any of us with a pulse will have ominously figured out already.

Gitelle left Lithuania immediately after World War One and its pogroms against Jews and the plot carries through to post World War Two. As one might surmise, Jewish characters in South Africa in a time period covering pogroms, the beginning of apartheid, and the Holocaust leads to a story with a strong theme of racism and intolerance. Within that, as a matter of natural course, there are scenes which leave one wondering how it ever works out that people who are violently oppressed because of prejudice (here the Jews) can ever in turn be prejudiced against others (in this case black South Africans). In a rather horrific scene, Gitelle, herself bearing a brutal facial scar slashed into her by a pogrom, turns away a black woman named Esther who merely needs a letter signed so that she and her family will not be shipped off to an apartheid reservation of disease-ridden horror. Then again, without injecting too much political theory into a book review, it is cynically observable that the oppressed tend to learn well the lessons taught by oppressors.

Isaac himself, born in 1919, learns all too well the dark lessons of his world. He carries one goal within him, one motivation for everything he does: one day he will move his family into a nice house as opposed to the room in back of his father’s watch shop. In so doing, Bonert chooses a motif recognizable by all. How many young athletes have we seen over the years who, after they win the cash lottery that is a professional draft say when asked what they are going to do with the sudden millions, ‘I’m gonna buy my mama a nice house’?

Isaac is no brilliant footballer though. Instead he must work his way towards money. He does not have much formal education, however he does have a tremendous skill with broken down autos. After meeting a con man/salesman/schemer named Hugo Bleznik – who is the best-drawn character in the novel – Isaac eventually starts to get ahead in a true and tripping dance of one step forward, two steps back, three steps forward, two steps back and so forth.

The hard nut choice in the book must not be discussed here. A novelist like Kenneth Bonert works years on a book and a guy like me watching Wimbledon with one eye and a MacBook with the other really shouldn’t blow the whole thing open in an hour’s typing. Allow me to offer a clue and within it a selection of Bonert’s writing. As World War Two approaches, Gitelle despairs for her four sisters still in Lithuania and wishes her nephew Avrom would pay to get them emigration papers to South Africa:

She was in a bad-enough way after the trip to Avrom but now her afternoon naps, once unthinkable, have turned into hour-long lie-downs that involve no sleep. He knows this from Abel, who tells him in a whisper how worried he’s becoming, how when he checks on her he finds her lying on her back with her eyes wide open and runnels of tears tracing down both sides to the ears. She who never cries. Isaac thinks of that time after he was beaten, when he lay and oozed tears from his cracked soul. He can see that Avrom’s refusal to help plus the terror of the bad news is doing to his mother’s spirit what the beating did to his: it’s the helplessness of being utterly overmatched. It makes you give up. But unlike his thoughts of revenge, she can’t just jettison her fears for her sisters back home.

And so, if you could save some but not all, what would you do? Who would you leave out? Enough said.

In general, The Lion Seeker is a very good novel that gives a good glimpse of greatness before not quite getting there. Bonert has a fine ear for dialogue and the characters’ voices are distinct and real, with one exception that I will get to shortly. He certainly gives us a feel for the rusted factories, the wild storms, the sheer… expanse of South Africa. When he describes violent acts, trust me, you will feel the blood ooze and the bones crack.

My one cluck of a tongue though is that Bonert does fall back on derivative characters and situations. Making a mention of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness is one thing; having an important character turning into Kurtz is something that should have sent an editor or at least a small terrier chewing at the author’s typing hand. Shovels are made for gardening and burials, not for slugging readers over the head with literary allusions.

The one character who made me fwow up the way Dorothy Parker reacted to Winnie the Pooh is Yvonne, the classic girl who’s too good for the boy. She is an Anglo South African, comes from as much money as Daisy Buchanan, has the liberal heart of Eleanor Roosevelt, and is as gorgeous as a supermodel lit by Vogue. Unfortunately she has all the believable depth of a photograph ripped from that fashion magazine and shown to the boys in the schoolyard as ‘Here’s my new girlfriend.’ Yeah right, buddy.

Yvonne talks like a Sloane Ranger, and worse than that she doesn’t speak, she speeches. For instance as The Voice of Correct Politics, she says, “Don’t lecture to me, Isaac, saying how things are and I don’t know anything. I am quite aware as you are that African people are to be different. What I am saying is that those differences are actually superficial.” Yes of course, that’s just the way eighteen-year-old girls talk to their boyfriends, just as they always say things like, “There’s nothing perfect, Isaac. I’m just a girl. And I can be bloody cruel.” The next time a teenage girl says that will be the first. Frankly I was glad when Yvonne ran off with a tennis player and got out of the novel.

As Kenneth Bonert progresses as a writer, I suspect he’ll feel less of a need to carry with him the things he has read and trust his own instincts and observations. When he is gritty, he is very very good; when he tries to glitter, he tarnishes.

Knopf | 576  pages |  $25.00 | paper | ISBN # 978-0307362131