The Impostor, by Damon Galgut

The newest novel by Booker Prize Nominee Damon Galgut, The Impostor, follows Adam, a man who has lost his job and his sense of self in Johannesburg and consequently retreats to his brother’s shack in the countryside to revive his poetic side. Within the first few pages, Galgut hints that something is amiss about the shack, relying on modern gothic conventions to create the eerie tone which pervades the work. It soon becomes apparent it is not the house that is haunted, but Adam’s mind, and in this richly psychological novel, the house becomes the externalization of Adam’s psyche , its gothic flourishes accentuating the novel’s more disturbing undercurrents that would otherwise be willingly forgotten. The Impostor is a novel where the action is subterranean, its momentum generated by Adam’s psychological descent into loneliness and obsession (and above all, self-obsession). The taut, restrained prose maintains the tension so that, like Adam, the reader suffers from an insidious, mounting anxiety that proves impossible to ignore.

Not long after his arrival, Adam runs into Canning, a man who insists he was an old friend from boarding school, and who openly worships Adam. Yet despite Canning’s insistence that Adam changed his life, Adam cannot remember him. With this unsettling relationship, we have the first potential impostor of the novel, though in the end, Canning is arguably one of the most genuine characters.

Canning is in the process of turning his father’s game reserve into a multimillion dollar golf course and resort, which is to be called Ingadi, or, “Garden.”  Adam is outraged when he discovers Cannning’s exploitation of the land, yet he fails to realize that the old game reserve was just as contrived as the new resort. Canning also has married a black woman, a former prostitute named Baby, whom he worships but who generally loathes him. He claims they are “the New South African couple.”  Adam eventually comes to covet Baby  and becomes her lover, despite the fact that he knows that his love isn’t genuine. He is suddenly able to write again, yet later he realizes that he has written trite drivel. And just as Adam blames Canning for exploiting the land, Adam fails to recognize his exploitation of Baby and her body. Their relationship is violent and self-serving,  a carnal infatuation that blinds Adam to his own motives and morals.

For Canning, of course, is not the only potential impostor – almost all the book’s characters are not who they say they are, and it is the classic tension between appearances and reality  that maintains the novel’s unsettling suspense. But more importantly, this contrast also furthers its political message – that South African society itself is an impostor, attempting to sweep the past upheaval under the rug and present a new progressive face. It holds those who, like Adam, are willingly oblivious of their own hypocrisy, as responsible for corruption as the Russian mobster financing a new country club. The novel’s final image – Adam passing through the shadow of a rusted, bird-shit-covered statue of a forgotten hero is the perfect metaphor for a country whose own ambivalent history may be ignored, but never forgotten.

Of course I offer these oversimplified generalizations from the comfort of my Canadian sofa, and one can’t ignore the extent to which this is a cautionary tale that demonstrates our self-serving moral relativism. Adam had the same liberal self-righteousness as I do, and perhaps my belief that I would act differently in a similar situation makes me an impostor too.

Many thanks to McClelland and Stewart and minibookexpo for this book.