Elton Baatjies
Lester Walbrugh, Karavan Press
***** (5 stars)
Between 1986 and 1995 on the Cape Flats, at least 22 boys were raped and killed by “the Station Strangler”. He turned out to be a schoolteacher, Norman Simons.
There are clear parallels with Lester Walbrugh’s new crime thriller, Elton Baatjies. Set in the fertile farming area of the Elgin valley outside Cape Town, the novel spins the slow and troubling story of Elton Baatjies, the new English teacher in town.
Everyone is already on edge because of “the Koppie Killer”, who has recently raped, murdered and dumped six schoolboys on the mountain slopes. Mr Baatjies lives alone, does not drink much, is a “gentleman” — and a sociopath of note. Unsuspected, he continues his streak of violence.
Walbrugh writes like Richard Rive meeting Deon Meyer. His writing about place is particularly powerful, saturated with love and dread: the whole novel is an exercise in stylish foreshadowing. The ocean with its white-tipped “skapies”, the mountain passes, the fynbos, beaches and bird hides are all places that make Baatjies feel at some sort of peace with himself. When he drives Randall Paatjies up Gantouw Pass they stop at the lookout point.
Randall, about to die, narrates: “The stars came on and they looked like glitter. He got out of the car and walked to the edge to pee. The crickets stopped making a noise like they wanted to keep quiet, for us, or like they were going to drop the beat. When I was smaller, I thought it was the stars that made that sound […]”
To think of this life being snuffed — and thousands of others, all special, all mourned — is overwhelming.
Walbrugh maintains his nerve. He is particularly good at articulating desire, how it blurs the boundaries of self and other, self and world. We feel its pangs at any age, but we are at our most vulnerable when we are very young. Walbrugh examines, poetically and minutely, the especial loneliness of those early teen years, the despair and self-loathing of anyone “different”, the turning aside of adults who have their own survival projects. Poverty, bigotry and disappointment culminate in isolation: “No one really listened.” No wonder the boys want to meet “Granville Titus” after their internet flirting: he seems to promise them sensation and connection. “I had to see for myself how it is.”
Walbrugh slips, easily and disturbingly, into each of the characters’ skins — from Junaid Japhta, the hapless officer who is being pressured to solve the murders, to Mrs Diedericks, the micromanaging headmistress who employs the killer because he “looks kind, nice and well put together”.
Most heartbreakingly, Walbrugh includes the deliberately brief biographies of the dead boys, in their own words. Each time there is a terrible switch from the present tense to the past after the first sentence. Their lives are over.
“I am Luciano Meyer. I was from Eersterivier. I was fourteen years old and I liked reading. I had no purpose in that classroom.”
“My name is Marceliano Marais. I was born in Upington, but my mother and father, they have problems with wine, so I grew up by Ma in the Strand. I was fourteen years old. I liked cars. Honda boys forever.”
As for Baatjies himself, Walbrugh offers no easy answers. Baatjies was once an exceptional child, but under apartheid something in him curdled and clotted. It’s hard to say why any one man turns monstrous when the others around him in the same circumstances grip tightly to sanity and kindness. Chemistry, circumstance, opportunity, habit ... Does it matter to those who are left behind in the valley?
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