Reviewed by Rod McLary
Irma Gold’s second novel Shift centres on Arlie a thirty-something reasonably successful photographer yet one who seems unable to really pull his life together. After another relationship break-up, he decides to leave Australia and travel to South Africa ‘to work up a new exhibition’ [40] as he does his best work when he is a foreign place ‘burrowing his way into some new understanding’ [40]. His parents – Harris and Dellie – were born and raised there before they came to Australia. Arlie’s mother – now agoraphobic – was badly traumatised by her experiences in Soweto even though she is white and continually refuses to speak of them. Clearly, an additional incentive for Arlie to go to Soweto and discover what he can of his parents’ past.
Once on the ground in Kliptown, a suburb of Soweto, Arlie immerses himself in the local culture as he prepares for his exhibition by photographing the local residents, their homes and businesses, and the other people he meets as he travels around Kliptown and the surrounding countryside. Through his eyes, the reader too is drawn into the Kliptown milieu and experiences – albeit at one remove – the violence, the poverty and the beauty of the town and its people.
Much as she did in her first novel The Breaking, the author describes the plight of the people – not by polemical argument but by simply and insightfully setting out the day-to-day lives of those around Arlie. These insights are enhanced by the objectivity of the camera as Arlie dispassionately captures the events without losing any of our sympathy and compassion. But at the back of his mind, he knows that soon he will return to Australia and his comfortable life and this knowledge underscores the value of his photographs and the impact they have on a deeper understanding of the conditions faced by the residents of Kliptown.
Through the narrative, the reader begins to experience how the people work in their businesses to bring about a better life for themselves and their families; how music brings so much joy to them; and how they navigate the vicissitudes of poverty, the disaffection of the teenagers and the implicit and ever-present threat of violence.
There is a very moving – and tragic – vignette involving Salmon the young twelve-year-old brother of Arlie’s girlfriend Glory. The tragedy is told with honesty and compassion and it draws attention as little else could to the precarious life of the townspeople.
Irma Gold’s grandparents lived in South Africa and her father was born there in the same year that apartheid officially began [1948]. The seed for this book was set from a visit which the author and her brother made to South Africa. There, they met a young man who took them to visit his cousin’s shack located close to Future Street [which features in the novel]. So Irma Gold is well-placed to write about Kliptown and this depth of knowledge informs the narrative every step of its way.
Shift is indeed a fine book and one that follows well the author’s first novel – The Breaking.
Shift
[2025]
by Irma Gold
MidnightSun Publishing
ISBN 978 192285 856 6
$34.99; 269pp