Review by Annabel
Les Fugitives is a small indie press that initially specialised in French translations, of both literary fiction and nonfiction (see here). Lately, they’ve widened their scope to include ‘innovative works originally written in English’ in their ‘quick brown fox’ collection, which this title is from.
Olufemi Terry hails from Sierra Leone, and was educated in England and the USA. He won the Caine Prize for African writing in 2010 for one of his short stories.
Wilderness of Mirrors is his debut novel, set in an alternate post-apartheid South Africa. Emil Silva is a medical student in the city of eGeld, training to be a surgeon, but he’s restless, not looking forward to going back to his studies, planning to have a year off to prevent burnout; he has eight years training still to go to be a neurosurgeon. When his father, Errol, suggests that he uses that some of that time to visit his sister’s family in Stadmutter on the Southern Tip of Africa, as Emil’s cousin, Andres, could do with a good male role model after his father died, Emil is persuaded. The novel begins as he is about to leave.
Night has the colour of old ink as he slips out of the city, first taking leave of his mother in the tall anteroom of her house in the suburbs. She is alone: his father is abroad attending a conference on money laundering at an alpine resort; on such days, the housekeeper is dismissed early.
[…] Holding the front door open ajar between them, as if to bar his reentry or to confirm his exile, Vivian Silva offers a parting shot in her native argot: ‘Careful wat jy vind dar.”
‘Careful what you find down there’, she’d said, with a pointed double meaning, glancing downwards at his crotch. It’s a long drive, but eventually he arrives in the suburb where his widowed Aunt Celeste lives.
The front door opens and Andres, unmistakably him, steps out onto the stoop. ‘E, wat is aan?” he hollers as Emil gets out of the car. Andres comes to the curb and takes his cousin’s hand in his own crushing grasp – no malice in it – clasping Emil’s shoulder at the same time. Andrew has the look of a rugby tighthead prop.
He’s surprised to be given Andres’ older brother Torrance’s room. Turns out Torrance has moved out to live with his girlfriend. Neither cousin seem to need his help, so he’s left to his own devices. Things begin to get interesting for him when he meets the charismatic Bolling, a German-Haitian businessman, who has some strong political ideas, and sees a fellow intellectual in Emil. He also meets Tamsin, a white PhD student obsessed with Freud, and they will become lovers, but not before Bolling woos Emil with ‘bush tea’ which contains a psychoactive ingredient. Bolling is expounding about himself.
“German is my mother tongue, but I’m Creole too. Antilliean, from Hispaniola. I’m not sure you can appreciate how seductive a place called Muttie is for Germans?”
Bolling is involved with backing the leader of a radical Creole movement, which seeks to shake up Stadmutter’s capitalist and centrist government. The Creoles under Braeem Shaka want reparations for having been oppressed for so long. However, Shaka ends up a fugitive and Bolling distances himself, leaving Emil and Tamsin to protect him, spending a fortnight in a remote farmhouse. But all things come to an end, and Emil realises he must return home; whether he restarts his studies is another matter.
I expected this novel to explore the cultural and class differences between the two cities it mirrors (Johannesburg and Cape Town). Affluent Creoles like the Silvas have a different life in eGeld than those Braeem Shaka is stirring up down south. Emil’s father Errol, follows the Stadmutter political situation from afar. I confess, I know very little about South African politics, and I gather that Stadmutter in this novel is quite different in that respect from real-life Cape Town.
Emil is a classic example of a young man trying to find himself in the world, not just in relationships, but starting as apolitical, he also needs to find his tribe in that respect. Then there is the matter of trust – can he really trust Bolling? Bolling is an enigma, a catalyst, not a villain as such, but he certainly has a narcissistic streak, providing the plot with intrigue and a certain danger. As a protagonist, Emil is quite his opposite, dispassionate and detached, but that suits Terry’s measured prose well, making this a novel to savour, and think about.
Annabel is a co-founder and editor of Shiny.
Olufemi Terry, Wilderness of Mirrors (Les Fugitives, 2026). 978-1068433856, 256 pp., paperback original.
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