An easily forgotten truth about societies undergoing political turmoil is that, in the shadows of dictatorship and corruption, life goes on. Until a certain point, work still begins in the morning, there are children to be consoled and disciplined, clothes to be washed, tables to be set. The Death of Rex Nhongo is an intriguing and yet imbalanced novel about such lives, in which political instability registers as a quiet quake beneath the feet of ordinary people, tilting them this way and that, as they attempt to navigate everyday matters of family, love and betrayal.
The book opens as if it were a work of non-fiction (an impression bolstered by the cautiously protective pseudonym of its author, CB George) with an account of the mysterious death of Zimbabwean ex-military chief “Rex Nhongo”, real name Solomon Mujuru, in 2011. That political mystery is a haunting presence in the first two-thirds of the novel, as the gun that we may infer shot the fatal bullets, and the shadowy figures who wielded it, appear at unexpected moments, in the back of a taxi, or sitting ominously in a bar. But the book reads as a character study of four marriages in contemporary Zimbabwe, each suffering some variety of strain. We meet British expats Jerry and April; their maid, Bessie, and her charismatic, striving husband Gilbert, who are torn apart by physical distance; Bessie’s sister, Fadzai, and her husband, Patson, whose inadvertent involvement in the Nhongo mystery leads to a newfound discovery of each other. And there is the unsympathetic, exploitative American Shawn, a former Wall Street banker, and his almost silent Zimbabwean wife, Kuda, whose marriage is tainted by deception.
George allows us into these marriages in intimate and revealing ways, switching between perspectives. It is not always clear why we spend more time with some characters than with others, and some motivations are clearer than others (Shawn, for example, never really gets the air time he needs) but, at its best, the novel delivers just the right types of poignant and telling details that make a character live for the reader.We learn of April’s hopelessly sad teenage meetings with her alcoholic father in the unglamorous setting of a local McDonald’s; of Jerry’s paralysis in the face of suffering on his first day volunteering as a nurse at a local clinic, a role in which he is soon reduced to handing out cash; of the tender yet self-conscious ways in which Fadzai and Patson begin to seduce each other again, in the twilight of their marriage.
The character portraits are less successful where George takes particular risks with language and stylistic devices. One of the most surprising central characters is Shawn and Kuda’s eight-year-old daughter, Rosie: the only child of any of the marriages whom we hear from directly. As a black American child in an African country, Rosie has the potential to occupy a particularly interesting space in the novel’s world, but the book is more concerned with the idea that she may contain a supernatural mystery within herself, one that causes several of the book’s major events.
Hers are the hardest sections to read. Perhaps to indicate the strangeness and isolation of her experience, George chooses to present Rosie’s chapters in an italicised first person, and in vernacular. This is notoriously difficult to do well in fiction: it must be exactly right for the character’s era and place, and it must provide an emotional or psychological intimacy that a more standard voice could not. Rosie does not sound like a fairly privileged kid from New York in 2011. Instead, with her semi-mystical insights, she drifts towards anachronistic, folksy caricature: “The truth not complicated. Iss jus the truth.” Or: “Mom look at Dad like he done sumthin bad … She look at him like that a lot, way more than me. Dad musta done a whole lotta sumthin bads.” These combine unconvincingly with misspellings of her spoken words (“enuff”, “Amerika”), displaying ignorance without conveying her true voice. George seldom achieves the naturalness of vernacular found in novels with a successful voice (for example, Kiese Laymon’s Long Division), and this distances us from the quiet emotional furnace that must burn inside this strange little girl.
These four marriages become intertwined as the story progresses, hurtling towards what seems like unavoidable (and perhaps a little too neat) tragedy for each of them. In the last third of the novel, the political mystery returns, and George adds in yet another perspective: that of one of the shady operatives we met early on. But by then we are less invested in the political thriller than in these flailing, floundering domestic lives, and so the political plot points seem only to function to bring the characters to a climactic series of events that, we are told in a kind of postscript, change all their lives for ever. But what is compelling is how much of the status quo is preserved: couples stay together, traditional rites are observed and the same failings are repeated. Like shell-shocked villagers after a war, the characters pick through the rubble of their lives, determined to put themselves together, convinced that life goes on.
• The Death of Rex Nhongo by CB George (Quercus Publishing, £16.99). To order a copy for £12.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
