My novel, Wilderness of Mirrors, follows Emil, a young medical student, to an austral metropolis very like Cape Town, where he’s to pursue the dubious errand of rescuing his drifting cousin. In Stadmutter, he meets three people who wrench him off the path he has mapped for himself. Tamsin, a historian of psychoanalysis, is coming to terms with a country where the standing of whites is both reduced and uncertain. German-Haitian Bolling uses his wealth to advance a reactionary and romantic anti-modernism that exerts a puzzling allure on Emil. The third, Braeem Shaka—Creole like Emil—is a wannabe revolutionary who has grasped that stoking resentment of the country’s Black majority offers an opening to power.

In my earliest conception, the novel was to form the third and final instalment of a Cape Town trilogy that began with JM Coetzee’s Disgrace and continued through K Sello Duiker’s Quiet Violence of Dreams. I have written elsewhere that I read Quiet Violence during the nights while working for a month in Acholiland, Uganda. Part of the inspiration of these novels lay in their depictions of Cape Town as protean, having no essence.

V.S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas influenced my wish to create a miasma of sullenness over Stadmutter, a localized mood of resistance to change and modernity, while exploring the links between geography, class, and political tension. On the first page of Guerrillas, Naipaul writes:

The sea smelled of swamp; it barely rippled, had glitter rather than color; and the heat seemed trapped below the pink haze of bauxite dust from the bauxite loading station. After the market, where refrigerated trailers were unloading; after the rubbish dump burning in the remnant of mangrove swamp, with black carrion corbeaux squatting hunched on fence posts or hopping about on the ground; after the built-up hillsides; after the new housing estates, rows of unpainted boxes of concrete and corrugated iron already returning to the shantytowns that had been knocked down for this development; after the naked children playing in the red dust of the straight new avenues, the clothes hanging like rags from back yard lines; after this, the land cleared a little. And it was possible to see over what the city had spread: on one side, the swamp, drying out to a great plain; on the other side, a chain of hills, rising directly from the plain.

In Guerrillas, Naipaul refuses to romanticize his revolutionary firebrand: Jimmy Ahmed remains resolutely human, a product of his circumstances and limitations.

A remark attributed to the Trinidadian writer provides another frame for Cape Town’s real and imagined. “All of this will revert—it will go back to bush,” Naipaul reportedly told Paul Theroux of Uganda, and Africa more generally. Cape Town, by contrast, does not encroach, being mostly semi-desert and having little in the way of critters, with the implication that freeing man of the mission to contend with nature leads to nothing good.

Naipaul is not the only controversial writer to influence the book. Hovering behind Wilderness (as it does for so much writing about Africa) is Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, with its subtext of Africa as a void space that lures civilised man into direct contact with his id (going native).

In my novel, the German Haitian Bolling owes something to Judge Holden in Blood Meridian, among the most transgressive works I’ve encountered.  Holden, Cormac McCarthy strongly implies, is some sort of demiurge, intermediate between man and God.

Toward the end of the novel, McCarthy describes the apparition of Holden thus:

It was the judge and the imbecile. They were both of them naked and they neared through the desert dawn like beings of a mode little more than tangential to the world at large, their figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the strangeness of that same light. Like things whose very portent renders them ambiguous. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed.

My admiration for Goncalo Tavares’ Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique, translated from Portuguese, encouraged me to be fuzzy about geography and temporality in my own novel. And the novel was influential in another way: its protagonist’s musings on the tension between man and nature inject a distinctly philosophical, Romantic-inflected tone into the narrative.

The reader of Learning to Pray is continually enticed to revisit conventional wisdom (delusions?) concerning human mastery and dominion over the natural world:

Man tries to resist [disease], finding allies in…centuries of medical and technical development, while on the other hand there is illness, likewise strengthened by centuries of its own particular history, to which men have no access. Illnesses have not stayed still.

The protagonist displays a grudging, paranoid admiration for the natural world.  “There was a new light in the cities… which had only increased the hatred that the most ancient elements in the world seemed always to have harbored for man.”

And it goes on in this vein:

Like illness, nature has its own past if not a history, its own rules and triumphs, and is enduringly at odds with humans’ own course. And nature’s permanence (Nature hasn’t even invented fire yet.), its impermeability to history was [its] major weapon. Meanwhile if materials and the ways of transforming them had…evolved human passions had nonetheless been immobilized.

Paul Theroux’s Blinding Light, with its exploration of drug-induced blindness and altered perception, and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, with its magical realist approach to displacement and migration, also shaped aspects of the narrative.