Exhibit A by Sarah Lotz

Title: Exhibit A
Author: Sarah Lotz
Publisher: Penguin
Published:  May 2009
Source: My copy
My Rating: 8/10

Buy a copy of Exhibit A

Georgie Allen, “Cape Town’s worst-dressed lawyer” and owner of what might be Cape Town’s worst car, can’t afford to add a pro bono case to his long list of troubles. But among those troubles is the fact that his love life has been reduced to giving Love24.com another shot, so when the gorgeous Rachel asks him to help her sister Nina, Georgie doesn’t even bother to discuss his fee. Nina was raped by a cop in a police cell in Barryville, “one of those tiny South African towns that’s stuck in a time warp and is dripping with small-town prejudice and incipient racist values” (6). As expected, the police didn’t bother opening an investigation when Nina laid a charge, so without Georgie’s help, the rapist will get away without so much as a rap on the knuckles.

Georgie leaves immediately for Barryville, stopping only to pick up his friend Advocate Patrick McLennan (aka “the Poison Dwarf”). Patrick brings along a cute but filthy mongrel that’s currently the key witness in a burglary and who Georgie aptly names Exhibit A. The dog promptly makes a bed out of Georgie’s jacket and begins the first of many ball-licking sessions.

If I had to pick just one reason that I’m glad I read this book, it would be learning the word “scrolfing” – Sarah Lotz’s term for the noise Exhbit A makes when he’s “been attacking [his] bollocks… with a dedication that would have been admirable, had it been doing anything else.” (1) Scrolfing is a “combination of grunts and the same liquid smacking noises my granddad used to make whenever he ate a chop without his dentures in” (1). It’s a very useful and oddly endearing term, specifically because I also have a loveable mongrel who makes the exact same disgusting noise despite the fact that she doesn’t have any bollocks to attack.

As it stands though, “scrolfing” is hardly the only thing that makes Exhibit A a good read. It also has amazing characters, a good plot, and it’s incredibly funny. Most of the humour comes from Georgie’s narration – a mixture of witty observations, mild self-deprecation and sarcasm. Just as funny is Patrick, a diminutive, junk-food scoffing Scottish lawyer who makes up for his small stature by being “total and utter bastard” (2) whether in the court-room, passing the bill in a restaurant, or arguing with his long-suffering wife with whom he has somehow conceived five children despite almost never seeing her because he’s always working. Whatever the weather Patrick wears a 3-piece wool suit, he has a strange talent for never spilling anything, even when eating Frosties with milk in Georgie’s lurching car, and he can be fantastically tactless.

Patrick asks Georgie to look after Exhibit A and Georgie grudgingly agrees, thereby turning his terrible car into a terribly smelly car and getting his awful clothes covered in a layer of white fur. The little dog doesn’t play much of a role in the main plot, but he’s a constant presence in the story and becomes an integral part of Georgie’s life and character; there’s a reason why his name is also the title of this book.

Georgie, Patrick and Exhibit A give heart and comic relief to a novel that might otherwise be painful to read. Unlike most crime or legal dramas, Exhibit A doesn’t deal with criminal masterminds or glamorous court cases. Instead its subject matter is something disturbingly common in South Africa – rape and police corruption. The perpetrator isn’t especially smart – he’s just a small-minded bastard who took advantage of his power to force himself on an easy target who probably wouldn’t stand up for her rights and couldn’t afford to seek justice.

On the downside (depending on how you see it), this means that Exhibit A lacks the thrills you might expect from John Grisham or similar. With grim dedication to a realistic depiction of crime in South Africa, the triumphs are mostly small and the frustrations many, and there are no heart-stopping moments when a shocking twist or major new clue is uncovered.

However, the kind of crime Exhibit A tackles gives the novel class. Not for a moment do you get the sense that the crimes committed here are somehow intended to be entertaining – an inescapable feeling in a lot of crime fiction where the crimes and criminals are so fascinating that the victims are only so many broken eggs needed to cook up a riveting story.

Exhibit A doesn’t sacrifice Nina that way. Nor does it have to. The story is compelling without being sensational, the humour is fresh and sharp, and the characters are so memorable you could feel that you’ve met them personally.

Reading over this review, it almost seems like I’ve written about two different books – a comedy about a pair of oddball lawyers and a scruffy mongrel on the one hand, and on the other a serious legal drama about two noble lawyers fighting for the rights of a woman who’s been abused by a corrupt police system. But somehow Sarah Lotz has sewn it all together without any of the elements ever clashing. Highly recommended.

The disgrace of being a victim

*Please Note: this review contains spoilers.

The first time I read Disgrace I hated it. It evoked so much anger and sadness I didn’t care if it was brilliant – I wrote it off as a horrible book. How could a woman feel that, because of apartheid, she should allow her rapists to get away with their crime? How could she allow the man who may have organised the attack to take over her farm? Why did the rapists have to shoot the dogs in their cages?

I didn’t want to see the movie, but a friend had a role in it and I felt obliged to watch it. I’m glad I did. After talking about it I realised that, although anger, disgust, and sadness were the emotions the story seeks to evoke, they’d obscured the ideas and insights offered. Of these there are many – I’ll have to stick to just a few.

Coetzee skilfully depicts some of the racial and power dynamics and attitudes at work in post-apartheid South Africa. As a 52-year old white male and an expert in Romantic poetry, David Lurie is out of date and out of place in this social and political landscape. However, he has no interest in adapting, believing that his temperament is fixed and that no one has any right to make him change. Elaine Rasool, the head of his department at Cape Tech, sees David as a “hangover from the past, the sooner cleared away the better.” Dawn, the secretary David sleeps with, has a view I’ve heard a few times – even though apartheid was morally bad, those were still, in some way, better days. In Dawn’s case, she believes the law was better enforced during apartheid; now it’s anarchy, and she wants to emigrate for the sake of her children.

In these attitudes is a reluctance or refusal to deal with the difficulties of SA today. Lucy’s approach on the other hand, is more complex, more practical, but also far harder to accept. As a white South African she sees herself ‘owing’ something for the privileges she enjoys, for the stolen land she lives on. She allows her rapists to get away with their crimes because she sees them as ‘debt collectors’. To her, violence is characteristic of  the place in which she lives, and if she wants to stay she must put up with it. Lucy, as Petrus says, is “forward-thinking”.

The injustice of this is very difficult to accept, and I personally cannot do it. Nevertheless, what I think is interesting here is the similarities between David and the rapists and how the reaction to the attack as a whole can be compared to ideas about apartheid today.

David draws a parallel with the rapists in his attitude toward sex – it is sex, not companionship he wants from women, he feels he has a right to pursue it, and uses whatever means he has to get it. In the past, his looks were enough. Now he pays for it, as he does with Soraya, or abuses his power as he does with Melanie. The difference between David and the three black rapists is that David has this financial and social power to wield. He can fork out R400 for a blissful afternoon, as a lecturer he can coerce a reluctant young student into sleeping with him. The three black men have only their physical power, and therefore resort to violence. The result is that, even though their attitudes are similar, David is seen merely as another womanising bastard, while the attackers are loathed as barbarians. Social circumstances make black stereotypes self-fulfilling prophesies.

The reader, rightfully, wants justice, making Petrus’s nonchalant attitude toward the attack infuriating. Yet his attitude is similar to the way many (privileged) South Africans view apartheid: it was bad, but it’s over now and we must all just get on with our lives. Now the tables are turned – the white man demands justice and the black man tells him to get over it.

The idea of ‘disgrace’ in which so much of the novel is steeped, is not what we expect or what it should be. With the exception of David’s disgrace after his affair with Melanie, it is the victims, not the perpetrators who are humiliated, broken down. The rapists leave Lucy a damaged and vulnerable woman; David is shamed by his inability to protect her and embarrassed by his physical wound; and of course apartheid has left millions disgraced by poverty, poor education and racial stereotypes.

In the end, I found that Disgrace had given me many tough questions to consider, but very few answers. Which is appropriate. There can be no easy solutions to healing the damage, the disgraces this country suffers from. One option, perhaps, is the course that David finds himself on – slowly broken down and humbled by his victimhood, by his time spent putting down stray dogs and cremating their bodies. He gives up on his grand opera, and starts from scratch with a simpler but more authentic one. He lets go of his lofty ideals, as he gives up the dog he was trying to save, and faces reality.

As brilliant as this book is, I would be reluctant to recommend it to most people, as it is painful to read, and a superficial reading could easily lead to racist interpretations. However, it’s an important novel, especially for South Africans, and I hope readers will do their best to endure the pain of it and take the time to consider its ideas.