Book Review - Due South Of Copenhagen by Mark Winkler

(c) Steven Boykey Sidley

Mark Winkler has written 5 novels, four of which I have read. He is, to my mind, South Africa’s finest novelist (OK, that’s a strong statement, so let me reluctantly walk that back, and say - one of SA’s finest novelists).

Such a strong statement needs backup, beyond just a sparkling review. So let me just put a pin in one – his stories and characters over his 5 novel ouvre are so diverse as to leave this writer shaking his head at the sheer chutzpah and diversity of his range, his seemingly endless ability to get into the minds and motives of both common and uncommon South Africans.

All without the heavy hammer of political posturing in a country where many novels submit to the jackboot of our fraught histories, often squeezing the life out them.

And so it is with Due South of Copenhagen, dealing with that most prickly and unstudied of subjects, the soft and unformed white boys conscripted into the South African army, entering as teenagers and exiting as lesser men in their own sad ways. At least in that part of history (somewhere between1978 – 1990) where the guns of the SADF were designed used arbitrality in the support of brutal political system few of these boys understood or cared about.

So this central part of novel just begs for politics of apology and moral revulsion. But Winkler simply never goes there, allowing the reader the dignity of her own judgements.

At the center of the story (written in the first person and somewhat informed by the author’s own experiences) is Maximillian Fritz. It covers his early life as quiet loner in a small Lowveld town, his subsequent service in the Navy and later posting to South West Africa, and his later years as an editor of a small newspaper in that same town where he grew up.

The book opens with a startling image. Max in 2018 finds an old photo of himself jokingly blowjobbing the barrel of a machine gun mounted on the prow of a boat. And so begins the story of the two deaths that anchor the book – one in a remote strip of land in northern South West Africa and the other in a dam on a farm in the Lowveld.

There is the shooting death of an anonymous black woman in the Caprivi strip, whose murder’s blame is diluted across a group of immature and scared and undertrained and morally-blind recruits of what was called Platoon One, Max’s crew. And then there is the death of a beautiful older woman found in dam on a farm in his home town, a woman of whom the young Max obsessed and dreamt, unrequited and distant. And suspects tried and hanged according the unjust and unexamined prevailing legal systems.

These two deaths are deeply intertwined, not by motive and deed, but by their contribution to the lifetime moral stunting and bewilderment of Max, a witness to both (and perhaps more).

Finally, underneath this story, runs the river violence bestowed on young white men who were visited by failed fathers and brutal political systems and blind institutions and arbitrary rules and the inexplicable ignorance, neglect and cruelty of men who should have known better.

And the characters! The men of Platoon One are gorgeous sculptures of white teenagers of all backgrounds all similarly flattened and fucked by seeing life’s underbelly too soon. The citizens of Max’s small town are a smorgasbord of eccentricity and small-mindedness and sudden kindnesses. Max’s one chance at love is a moving study in loss and regret to a woman betrayed by an unshakeable faith in the impossible.

And finally, all of this in just 200 pages, spanning back and forth across decades. A mercy and miracle of brevity.

Winkler is a quiet writer with a giant voice, underexposed and underappreciated.

I would like to help change that.

Published by Umuzi