The Fetch

by Finuala Dowling

The coastal settlement of Slangkop, near Cape Town, comes alive over weekends when mercurial Chas Fawkes holds court at Midden House. Invited to one of his legendary parties, shy, plump librarian Nina Browne is smitten and becomes first his secretary, then his lover. But things are not as they seem on the glittering surface, as Nina in turn is loved and watched over by Chas’s childhood playmate, the hermit-like environmentalist William. When Chas’s estranged alcoholic wife Dolly briefly returns, she steals William’s savings and leaves behind a different treasure – her baby son, Oro. In a gentler, more innocent way than Chas, young Oro is a catalyst in the Slangkop community. William is forced out of his seclusion and proves a surprisingly good stand-in dad. William is still desperate to win Nina’s heart, but how, when she is so caught up in Chas’s slipstream? As the inhabitants of this eccentric seaside community orbit around Chas and his increasingly desperate crises, sex raises questions that love must help them answer.

335 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 14, 2015

Reviews

[Tiah]

- Nina imagined that hell might be like this: being mauled by a tall woman in tight stonewashed jeans while her husband pointed out one's aesthetic shortcomings and spoke admiringly of an ectomorph. -

- You longed for someone to notice you, the real you inside, the one that had ideas and feelings, but people kept returning to your appearance instead, forcing it upon you, saying: 'This plump milkmaid is the real Nina. She is not glamorous or fascinating or clever, but she would look good on a milk cart, surrounded by her churns.' -

- She was not a subtle, nocturnally scented shrub. Dolly was one of those people who present themselves to the world as a permanent emergency. Nothing else is important, shrieks the permanent emergency, but my crisis, my pain, my need. -

- Nina had been inside old houses that had been stricken by the past. Something sad hung about the banisters or dangled from the cornices; you found yourself walking through unexplained cold patches; you felt relieved when you were out in the sunshine again. -

- There was nothing you could do to reform a hugger. -

[Hecate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finuala Dowling is described as a South African Jane Austen, and the comparison is a good one if you think of Austen's words about choosing "Three or Four Families in a Country Neighbourhood" as her canvas. The heroine of The Fetch is a shy and unworldly librarian from a small village on the South Peninsula, and every element of the landscape is comfortingly familiar and discomfortingly acutely observed, to the extent that Slangkop, its caves and tides and baboons, becomes a character in its own right. I love Dowling's mordant wit, her effortless grasp of how the banal and the tragic are tangled up. Her novels raise fascinating ethical debates for me -- the extent to which we can reanimate real people in our fiction. (A version of her ex-husband appears in three of her novels, including this one.) I said of Flyleaf (her second novel) that reading it was like drinking chilled Chardonnay in a hot bath, and give this one a similar imprimatur. My quibbles are production-related: the editing is a let-down (but perhaps only noticeable to the likes of me, esp after the superb editing of her previous novel, Homemaking for the Down at Heart) and the cover is dreary.

[Jude · Rating 3 out of 5]

I very much enjoy the way Finuala Dowling writes. It's perceptive, witty, and poetic. This is the story of Nina, a rather stereotypical librarian in a small village in the Cape peninsula. The descriptions of the landscape, the sea, birds, snakes and insects are fascinating, especially as seen through the eyes of a small child, Orrie. I liked the way the characters developed, and the way relationships grew and then faded, or seemed hopeless and then succeeded. And I also learned a few new words, like 'the fetch', and 'perorations'...

[Elsa · Rating 1 out of 5]

I could not even get far reading it.

[Christina’s Word · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful, sensitive, poignant, funny story set in the coastal wilds outside Cape Town. This is a departure from the usual South African novel -- not the sweeping landscape, the huge brush strokes, the big political stage; this is a delicately told story of a community learning to care for each other. A commedy of errors -- the characters living beyond the colonial fantasy of high tea and house boys, the political struggle, the us and them. These are people coming to terms with the reality of ordinariness, that we need to look out for one another. The characters range from the flamboyant ACDC Chas Fawkes (Guy Fawkes), his erstwhile wife Dolly, their abandoned son Oro, (Sweet) William the conservationist and recycler of all things, little Nina Browne (mouse) who scuttles between library stacks hoping to be lifted to a more exciting world, general factotum Emmanuel (God is with us), Fundiswa, both fun and fundi, who is having an illicit relationship with a Bishop, a twitcher named St John. Dolly steals her husband's bag of gold coins, but fails to value their baby son (the real gold, Oro), Fawkes blows up any chance of happiness or normality and creates chaos. While William is the one holding it all together, Nina has eyes only for Chas . She doesn't appreciate his untrustworthiness, although she acts as his loyal fetch. She fails to value William; like a Jane Austen character, she is attracted to the wrong man, the one who will never love her, until it's almost too late. Acutely and minutely observed, Dowling deserves the title of the Jane Austen of South African literature.