JOBURG ZEN

In Martini’s thriller, a journalist researching a South African golf legend becomes entangled in the horrific events of his own youth that won’t stay buried.

Growing up in the violent chaos of South African apartheid in the 1980s and ’90s, Alex Lago and his disillusioned, nihilistic friends have one goal: “Getting out of Joburg alive. That was our African dream.” Lago does escape—barely. After decades away from his hometown, he returns to try to uncover the real history of Bobby Locke, world champion golfer and “South Africa’s greatest-ever sportsman.” Locke’s story, sadly, is characteristic of Johannesburg, which “doesn’t traffic much in happy endings”: Decades of alcoholism, systemic racism, misogyny, narcissism, numerous run-ins with the law, and a serious car accident involving a train eventually ended his career. The tragedies continued long after Locke died, when his reclusive wife and daughter ended their lives in a suicide pact. When Lago returns to his old stomping grounds, now radically different in terms of racial demographics and socioeconomic disparity, he realizes that Locke’s sad story shares parallels with Lago’s own youth—the drugs, the lawlessness, the desperation. The deeper he digs into Locke’s all-but-forgotten history, interviewing old friends and others who were close to the golfer, the closer Lago comes to unearthing the terrible truth that led him to leave Joburg so many years ago.

The intertwining of nonlinear stories—Lago’s horrible secret from his youth and Locke’s tragic life—keeps the momentum brisk until the very end and makes for a fascinating dichotomy that contrasts the Joburg of the past to the city in the present day. Another noteworthy attribute of the novel is the subtle way in which the author infuses social commentary into the storyline: “Africa’s the future, brother…The rich hiding behind walls and the rest living in hell. That’s the entire history of our species…Not a coincidence the richest dude in the history of the world is a white South African, right?” Unarguably, the most impressive element of the novel, which is based on true events, is Martini’s distinctive prose, which is simultaneously eloquently brutal, lyrical, and deeply philosophical. Many novels have a handful of good lines; some releases have no noteworthy passages. The truly memorable sentences in this dark gem of a novel are bountiful: “Joburg is a crack whore in a torn dress, fighting on a street corner on a Tuesday afternoon, wig ripped off, shoes lost, spit and blood flying”; “I remember the frail Edwardian houses as they once were, their verandas crowded with people on summer evenings, but they pass by in the night now as gutted husks of crumbled masonry and emptied misery, the old art déco buildings iridescent in open-pit fires, squat vertical slums of absence.” Historical fiction aficionados will be more than impressed by Martini’s meticulous descriptions of Joburg throughout the decades, and crime story and mystery fans will enjoy puzzling out Lago’s secret. This unsettling fusion of historical fiction and brutal noir thriller also functions effectively as a coming-of-age tale—Lago’s harsh journey of self-discovery is laden with nuggets of existential wisdom, such as the realization that some things are best left in the past.

Profoundly disturbing and disturbingly profound—a haunting, unforgettable story.