Crooked Seeds by Karen Jennings is a riveting read, but relentlessly dismal

The novel delivers a raw portrayal of a broken life amidst the ruins of Cape Town, challenging readers with its stark depiction of humanity in crisis.

Presented in shards and splinters, the story echoes Deidre’s shifting states of consciousness, with the past and the future both clawing at her. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/ iStock

Cape Town, South Africa, 2028. On the very first page, we watch as a slatternly one-legged woman called Deidre van Deventer struggles out of bed in order to relieve herself in an old plastic mixing bowl. The scene sets the tone for all that follows in this short, riveting, and yet relentlessly dismal novel. Middle-aged and single, Deidre lives alone in a tiny corner of a dilapidated public housing complex. Water is in short supply and must be trucked in, under armed escort. Residents queue with ID cards and containers to collect family quotas. The crippled woman survives on alcohol, cigarettes, and toxic memories of an earlier, more middle-class existence.

At the outset, she still has a friend or two willing to put up with her foul mouth and filthy personal habits. She has a brother called Ross whom her mother idolises. There is a grown daughter called Monica, who lives overseas and sends money to support her. Her father is dead and her mother, Trudy, though lost to dementia, is cared for by the state in a clinic across the road.

Crooked Seeds

By Karen Jennings

Picador India

Pages: 226

Price: Rs.499

Meanwhile, a police investigation is in progress. Despite Deidre’s reluctance, a scrupulously polite black male officer arrives to transport her in his car to the site of her past. It is the plot of land on which her childhood home once stood. The building that her father had built with his own hands was reduced to rubble by a bomb blast. It was the same bomb blast that blew off her leg and destroyed the lives of her whole family.

Shards and splinters

The police have questions, but Deidre’s fuddled brain refuses to focus on what they want to know. They ask about the bodies that have been discovered buried in the backyard of the family home. Bodies of children. They want information about Ross. Suspected of being a pro-apartheid terrorist, he has been absconding for some years. Although Deidre’s memory cannot furnish answers, the questions stir the rubble in her brain. From the ruins of what she half-remembers, a secret begins to emerge that is even worse than what the police suspect.

Jennings’ writing is as pitiless as a surgeon’s scalpel, picking out details in stark, short sentences. The dialogue is bone dry: after offering her neighbour Miriam a cup of tea, Deidre says: “Oh, listen, if you want that cup of tea, you’ll need to take your own tea bag. I don’t have any.” No attention is wasted on niceties such as romance or love though there are tiny flickers of remembered tenderness: the soft hair on a baby’s head, the single earring and old leather jacket of a first boyfriend.

Presented in shards and splinters, the story echoes Deidre’s shifting states of consciousness, with the past and the future both clawing at her. As we witness her descent down the slope of squalor until there is nothing left to describe, it is hard to like her or even to pity her. As Miriam says: “Every time I think I’ve seen the worst of you, you come out with something even more terrible.” It is rare, really, to read of a woman’s downfall described in such unsparing terms. In some ways, that is an admirable feat because women characters are so often held to unrealistic standards of behaviour.

Cover of Crooked Seeds | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

In other ways, however, I feel as if the author is telling the reader that this novel is going to dive down into a pit of nastiness that, in today’s world, can only be associated with people of the white race. In other words, it is as if she is appropriating bad behaviour as something to be expected of a white person, as a racial stamp. On account of her own whiteness, she permits herself the freedom to do that. But is that courage or is that exploiting a loophole in the literary world’s value system? Is it a higher truth or reverse racial stereotyping?

Reading The Island

In order to try and sort out my thoughts, I read another of Jennings’ books, The Island. It was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize and comes with lavish recommendations (as does Crooked Seeds). But, right away, this earlier novel about a lighthouse keeper whose lonely life on an island is intruded upon by a man who washes up half-dead on the beach, immediately reveals itself as superb. The tone of the writing is as austere and stripped down as in Seeds. But the construction of the suspense across the brief span of 215 pages (on Kindle) and the denouement that is as abrupt as it is fitting are masterful. Observations about the behaviour of hens and seagulls, of a man’s ageing body, of solitude and the appreciation of solitude—all of these have a quality of truth and light that quicken the reader’s senses. A story that might have been as dismal as Seeds is instead lifted up to a higher plane, attaining a type of noble inevitability.

I would strongly advise reading both books. They are both, in their separate ways, about the catastrophe that befell the people of South Africa, historically as well as after the end of apartheid. Both books are harsh, unsparing portraits of a people and a culture in crisis. But they are presented in a culture-neutral voice, which makes it easy to extrapolate from these characters to humans in crisis anywhere in the world.

Manjula Padmanabhan is an author, playwright, artist and cartoonist. Her most recent book is Taxi, a witty, racy novel set in Delhi, about a woman taxi driver.