At The Still Point

by Mary Benson. 1969. Published by Virago Modern Classics 1988. 250 pages.

Reviewed 30 September 2007

This is a book about South Africa, about Apartheid and oppression, about justice, about civil rights checked and frustrated. We follow the travails of Anne Dawson, a writer who’s been unlucky in love. After breaking up with her flame in New York, she returns to her home country of South Africa. Here, she finds herself torn between her family’s racist friends and a group of dissident, anti-apartheid intellectuals who are closer to her heart, but who frighten her because of the risks they take in defying an increasingly oppressive South African government.
What works about this book is the political and journalistic angle. I got an education about the history of government restrictions, about the pass laws (requiring Africans to carry their papers on them whenever they went out in public), about the way the white government urged former members of the African National Congress to testify against one another in return for lighter prison sentences.
The story of Anne Dawson, of her inner life and of her romance with the activist attorney Matthew Marais, is less engaging and less genuine. Narrating in the first person, Dawson goes to great lengths to create a jumpy, disoriented stream of consciousness, full of vivid sense impressions and memories that leap at you from out of nowhere. But the more we get to know her, the more it seems that Anne is actually a very linear, prosaic person; the edgy narrative style seems an affectation and a distraction. It gets even worse whenever Anne gets going about her romance with Marais. The writing in these sections gets so overwrought you almost want to take a pen and just cross it out and get back to the main part of the book.
In the course of the story, Anne discovers her true path in life as she chronicles the injustices carried out every day in the South African courthouses against civilians such as schoolteacher Beatrice Qaba and ANC leader Daniel Makhana. The quality of prose in these courtroom scenes is so much superior to the mushy narration of the romantic scenes that it seems that Benson must also have been in a process of discovering what did and didn’t work for her as she wrote this book. I suspect that there were a lot of forces at work both internally and externally that told her politics was a poor choice of subject matter; perhaps too dangerous, perhaps too obvious, probably not “artistic” enough. It’s clear that as a writer and a reader, Mary Benson had steeped herself in poetry and psychological fiction, and probably envisioned herself going in this direction.