WHAT ARE YOU ACTUALLY TRYING TO SAY MIKE NICHOL? When Bob Dylan met the Beatles soon after they broke into the American pop music market in the sixties, he asked a question which so profoundly influenced John Lennon, that Lennon thereafter explained his contemplation of the answer to this question as the cause of a decisive shift in his use of music as a tool for social and political commentary on what was fundamentally wrong in society at the time. Bob Dylans question was : What are you trying to say? I have a habit of ravenously reading every contemporary South African writer in both English and Afrikaans as far as practically possible but, in some cases, I am finding it difficult to answer this question clearly with reference to the current stock of South African contemporary crime, mystery and police procedural genre. With the exception of Maggie Orford and Deon Meyer, who should preferably be read in Afrikaans first, what you get is what you expect from any commercial market page turner, but Mike Nichol puzzles me. I have read his trilogy Payback, Killer Country, and Black Heart, as well as finished his latest titled Of Cops & Robbers(2013). In my opinion, his latest work continues his deconstruction of a morally ambiguous dystopian South Africa in which the imaginary line between heroes and villians blur in mutually destructive engagement, primarily as amoral antagonists without a cause beyond their own selfish interests. As genre fiction, I have no beef with the Mike Nichols works I have read; it ticks all the obligatory drama boxes when it comes to animating otherwise run of the mill contemporary events and facts, developing well-rounded morally ambiguous characters, and his uncanny gift to recast what appears to be pedestrian circumstances such as eating at Knead in Muizenberg into something interesting and plot enhancing. However, I finished reading Of Cops and Robbers with the uncomfortable feeling that the dystopian morally ambiguous reality of the South Africa and Cape Town he deconstructs might be precisely what he is actually trying to say. If this is so, then I do take issue with Mike Nichols book Of Cops and Robbers, and more so with the creative artist as social messenger, and not the writer as purely cultural producer for the pop-fiction market. And in this regard, I do agree with Jeanette Winterson when she argues about the role of the writer and artist in her book titled Days of War, Nights of Love, as follows: Imagination should be used first and foremost to transform everyday reality, not just to make symbolic representations of it. How many exciting novels could be written about the sort of lives that most of us lead these days, anyway? Let us make living our art, rather than seeking to make mere art out of out lives. However, maybe I am reading too much into Mike Nichols book Of Cops and Robbers, and Bob Dylans enigmatic question to the Beatles, has no logical answer in this case at all.
Posted on: Sat, 26 Apr 2014 15:38:30 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015