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Book review: My Brother's Keeper
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August 20, 2009
By James Mitchell
My Brother's Keeper
By Jassy Mackenzie
Umuzi R170
Reviewing Jassy Mackenzie's last thriller, Random Violence, a year ago, I said her fight scenes "hit Deon Meyer level". Now it seems Meyer might be agreeing: his back-cover plug reads "More Mackenzie, please..."
Mackenzie is a writer to be cherished. My Brother's Keeper has all the strength of her previous debut effort, yet in no way echoes it.
We see Joburg paramedics in action every day: many of us have reason to be grateful for their skill and speed. Mackenzie's protagonist Nick Kenyon is one such: an ex-ops medic from the bush war days, he's now getting on a bit for this demanding field. In between, he's done a stint in Sierra Leone as a "private military contractor": reading the passing references to that terrible conflict I thought of Eeben Barlow's masterly Executive Outcomes: Against All Odds, such is the understated, coolly factual way in which Mackenzie paints Kenyon's past. No surprise, then, to find Barlow credited in the acknowledgements.
The story opens with just another house robbery, but told from the perspective of one of the attackers, the light and lithe 15-year-old Sipho. He'll trigger no alarms, and it's better that he's never seen by the occupants, so that in future "nobody would be suspicious of the 'small boy' innocently playing soccer in their street". Shots are fired and it all goes pear-shaped.
Flash forward six years to one of those vile rainy nights that Joburg drivers seem to handle so badly. There's a young woman in the wreck, bare legs crushed by the engine block. But where's the driver? Thrown clear? A quick search is all that Nick and his driver Laki can manage. Give the cops a heads-up; that will have to do.
Natasha - that's her name - has been stabilised at Sandton Medi-Clinic, a beacon of first-world medicine - but she's got no medical aid. So she'll end up in Joburg General or whatever it's called today: "overcrowded, understaffed and underfunded, with demoralised nurses, ancient equipment and hygiene standards that veered between inadequate and deadly, depending on who was on duty". There, something worse than inadequate hygiene awaits.
Just as this country is a world leader in emergency medical care, so it leads in protection and security. Clinton Ramsamy's wearing his lucky socks as he prepares to host two UK visitors who fancy buying into Stronghold Security.
Ramsamy and partner Patrick Monyane had bought and turned around, a few years back, what "was originally a specialist assets-in-transit business run by a father-and-son team".
We'll learn later that the father and son were Nick Kenyon's father and elder brother Paul. Father's in Modderbee, brother's just out and not in a forgiving mood about Nick's part in locking him away.
We meet one of those gorgeous, hard-as-nails ex-wives that Joburgers seem to collect: Tayla keeps Nick on a string to do the jobs she's too idle to sort out for herself, but can't stand him coming anywhere near her. What gives?
Someone's tracking Nick. He turns to Johan Swanepoel, a colleague from past days who's become a "security consultant", the sort of person a lot of us are glad to have as a friend, the sort that when you need, you need badly.
This is a book you'll race to finish, and the double denouement is as satisfying as it's unexpected and shocking. It's perfect in its reality, yet nowhere trite.
The violence Mackenzie describes is all too believable, yet never gratuitous or over-hyped. Overseas readers may find it difficult to comprehend how the "good guys" can casually leave a couple of bodies lying around in a squatter camp outside Louis Trichardt and just how uninterested the local inhabitants are about all the shots being fired. But that's also our reality.
Mackenzie's writing is darker than Meyer's, with little of his occasional, well-directed humour. But her observation is as rich: for example about the way taxi drivers - otherwise everybody's enemy - will always move over for an ambulance, while the Beemers and the Audis often won't give a damn, just the finger.
This is an author who's utterly authentic, who knows whereof she writes. I can't wait for the next instalment.
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