NOVEL FOR EVERYONE - PARTICULARLY TEACHERS
Danie Marais

Rapport
September 23 2007 (translated from Afrikaans by Paul Wise)

The poet DANIE MARAIS believes that infatuation also happens with books. And even though he might be biased towards Finuala Dowling, he thinks that teachers who are frustrated with the "gum-chewing, iPod-listening, rowdy young people in the back desks" will also enjoy the novel.

By implication I am not competent to review Flyleaf, because as early as the first chapter it disarmed me and, by the second chapter, I was head over heels. There's nothing for it but to explain why I have such a soft spot for this novel and the writing of Finuala Dowling. Then you can decide for yourself whether the book might also be for you.

Flyleaf, like Dowling's first charming novel, What Poets Need, takes place in Kalk Bay, a coastal village between Muizenberg and Simon's Town. This time, however, the main character, Violet Birkin, is female, and she makes an emergency landing in Kalk Bay after her marriage with the flamboyant Frank Eastwood Lea - "Actor and Master of Ceremonies, Albertus Extra Bold" - breaks down. Frank has cheated on her with the beautiful, young Isabella, who is now expecting his child. It is not Frank who leaves Violet, however - he avows his love to both women and is quite amenable to a romantic threesome.

In the Bird House of her eccentric old friend Marina, Violet finds refuge - or rather a single room in a bohemian house by the sea where Marina receives numerous men and her aimless teenage son, Leo, wafts in and out between parties, surfing expeditions and assorted odd jobs.

While Violet tries to understand how she could have been so mistaken about Frank and who she is now that she is suddenly without him, she needs to teach and write literacy courses for adults in rural areas for a living. The institution where Violet lectures English and journalism, United College, is a second-rank tertiary training centre where she is badly exploited.

Dowling herself has a failed marriage with a theatre personality behind her, writes English courses and is a seasoned lecturer. So she is intimately acquainted with her themes and the circumstances of her main character and makes from them fiction full of humour, pungent irony, insight and compassion. Violet's observations about the indolent yet entertaining Frank are a bittersweet pleasure, and her literary sketches en passant of Kalk Bay and its characters capture a complex melancholy.

However, it is Violet's musings on the learning and teaching process and her interaction with students that take up the largest part of the book. And it is Violet the lecturer who succeeds in capturing something of the essence of any teacher or educator's powerlessness and despair. Violet is ensnared in enthusiasm for her subject, empathy with her students, concern about money and the apathy of the many gum-chewing, iPod-listening, rowdy young people who crowd into the back desks of her classes. She tries to make sense of the classroom, where the teacher's high ideals and the department's fine theories confront a confusing and pitiless reality.

Here is one of Violet's many telling observations: "It wasn't the content of the lessons that worried me. The syllabus was laid down in the sickening educational speak of the day. [...] In my heart I know that learning is something that takes place when you're not even aware of it, when you're having so much fun (or, in the case of life, pain) that knowledge rushes your fortress. I taught in these brief chinks, in the interstices of the lesson."

Yes, truth comes in blows, as Henderson realises in Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow, and Flyleaf remains, notwithstanding quite a happy ending, true to harsh reality - unlike ever-popular Hollywood movies such as Dead Poets Society, Dangerous Minds or Mona Lisa Smile, in which we always encounter super-teachers who challenge the system in hyper-conservative schools with demonic principals and horrid colleagues and radically change the lives of almost all their pupils.

When Violet decides to admit defeat at United College and finally leaves the campus, she drily remarks what an uneventful anticlimax it is: "I don't know what I expected. [...] Someone on a desk saying, 'Captain, my captain.'" And it is bitter, because, as Violet says, "There was only one reason to work so hard for so little pay: to be loved and followed by loyal disciples."

This book should find favour with anyone who is or has been in teaching, or has been sorely disappointed in love. But this still does not mean that you will be as much in love with the book as this reviewer is. To fall for someone or a book, you need more than just a lot in common - you have to be hypnotised by a tone of voice, a way of looking and saying, and often a sense of profound empathy; you must want to cook for the main character and wish that you could comfort her when she meets adversity in the story.

Dowling's writing already had this effect on me in her prize-winning verse debut, I Flying. Her words and characters read me like a book. Perhaps she will have the same effect on you.