‘Nightwatching’ by Méira Cook

Reviewed by Rachel Carlson

South African born Méira Cook makes Winnipeg the home where she makes her mark. Cook’s poetry won first place in the CBC Literary Awards in 2007 and also won the inaugural Walrus Poetry prize in 2012. She has published several books of poetry including A Fine Grammar of Bones (1993), Toward a Catalogue of Falling (1996), and Slovenly Love (2003). A fourth collection, Monologue Dogs (2015), was published this spring. Her first novel, House on Sugarbush Road, took the 2013 McNally Robinson Book of the Year award. Like Sugarbush Road, set in post-apartheid Johannesburg, Cook’s second novel, Nightwatching, is a return—this time to ’70s era apartheid in the Orange Free State of South Africa.

Her protagonist, Ruthie Blackburn, is a listless white child standing awkwardly in the doorway of pubescence. Or rather, she peers into a threatening and incomprehensible window of adulthood as she wanders in the night, spying on her neighbours while they have parties, watch television, or vomit drunkenly into hedges. The scenes and characters she catches fill her with both longing and revulsion. She’s teaching herself to negotiate adolescence without guidance. She is friendless—even unlikable—her mother is dead and her father largely lost in his work and his burgeoning love affair. Despite her unpredictable, spasmodic nature and her penchant to hurl cutting insults, Ruthie is loved by her family maid, Miriam, and the neighbour child, Sip.

Miriam is a good-natured woman. She is a bastion of patience with the lonely and incorrigible Ruthie and a calm centre of compassion for the frequently abandoned and abused Sip. But Miriam is denied the chance to raise her own children under the conditions that are built to exploit her. Like other black domestic servants her children are sent away when they become too inconvenient: “As the months passed, more and more babies would be missing from the roll call. Too old to stay with mothers the madams would say, so they’d have to be sent back to their homelands, to a grandmother or an aunt.” This forced exile would saw into the heart of any community and cut down women, in particular, at the knees.

The third narrative focus lands on Sip, the son of the neighbour’s drunken gardener. Precocious and fastidious, Sip devotes himself to the petulant Ruthie—stealing candy cigarettes for her, bending to her whims, absorbing her petty spites, much the same way Miriam endures the oppressions of the wider world. Like Ruthie, he’s motherless and free to roam. He seeks succour in the routine of Miriam’s days in Mr. Blackburn’s kitchen and in the hope of acceptance there: “Indeed, Sip aimed to be the quietest dish dryer that mister had ever failed to hear, an unfortunate ambition insofar as silence was an often over-looked category of appreciation, Sip was coming to understand.”

Nightwatching is a novel of divisions and clefts. There’s a distancing between Miriam and Ruthie that embodies the racism and privilege that Ruthie will inherit. As she watches her father’s dinner guests—his lover and her brother—antagonize Miriam with a series of small demeaning gestures, Ruthie acquiesces to their contempt: “…Miriam was a stranger to her now. Such moments were rare but terrible—those times when the cozy, yolky ‘we’ of Miriam and Ruthie separated into two people, neither of whom she recognized.”

But Ruthie is also vulnerable—to the threatening taunts of neighbourhood boys and the impressive swagger of alluring adults. Her frustrated and ineffable desires separate her even from herself: “She’d learned, that summer, to touch herself down there in the dark…But she did not think of her nighttime self during the day…they were these two girls and they did not meet in the middle.” The story of Ruthie’s growing pains and ill-fitting clothes and the tense transition between childhood and adolescence are lyrical and familiar.

Cook’s novel is also split between the unexpected and the predictable. The narrative sings with Cook’s poetic prowess as she creates an immersive setting and tension built with commanding imagery. A tea cup placed in a saucer becomes a chess piece played between neighbourhood gossips, or Ruthie’s thoughts are transformed into “windows that opened and shut.” Even weather events are alive and extraordinary under the author’s deft imagination: “Outside the heat gathered to a head, and broke in a short, violent thunderstorm, convulsive as a sneeze, as soon over as it began.”

But while the prose offers up the beautiful and the unexpected, the plot and characters are at times unsatisfying and easily anticipated. The watchful, resentful neighbour passively stewing next door, or the few barely held together threads that make up Lionel Blackburn. Without any depth, these characters crouch in the text like unpacked baggage to be tripped over—opaque but passive obstacles.

At the same time, Cook manipulates passivity to build the wider tension thrumming through apartheid South Africa: “Ai kona! Thought Miriam and the great serpent impatience that slept always in her belly woke and clattered in its coils as if jibbing her: How long, oh my people, how long?” Patience is a survival tactic for Miriam, one that helps her raise and protect her family even after her husband dies an uneducated labourer dragging minerals from the earth for white men.

Perhaps we are like Ruthie, whose only release comes from blood-letting—unsatisfied with the narrative’s tragic and unjust ending, and its passive and unremarked reception by the characters we’ve come to care about.

HarperCollins | 288 pages | $19.99 | paper | ISBN #  978-1443433860