“Nomsulwa plays with bullets in the alleyway.”
The first words of Emma Ruby-Sachs’s debut novel distill a violent South African legacy spilling down through generations, renewed at every cradle. In the back streets of Soweto, a boy considered too young for gang warfare can still pack a gun. In that dusty alleyway, Nomsulwa is allowed to examine the pistol of a young friend. As pubescent gunslingers wrestle in the dirt, she picks up one of her shiny playthings, loads it into a chamber and aims at a skeletal street dog. The recoil breaks her arm.
Flash forward to adulthood. Nomsulwa is a single twentysomething in a post-apartheid, government-issued tract house in the townships around Johannesburg. Part of a Soweto community-rights group, she and her male cousin Mira are active in efforts to sabotage the recently privatized and corrupt water and power distribution systems. As a supportive local policewoman turns a blind eye, they join a group of stealthy night shovellers, who dig up and steal a section of water pipe freshly laid that day in the dirt street. The thriving black market will absorb the piping and help to fund desperate efforts to retain and restore the equitable old system.
Nomsulwa and her cohorts are battling more than local profiteers. A Canadian water-company executive is back in town, lambasting his partners for lax security at the pipeline sites. After an unproductive meeting with water reps and city councillors, he is talked into a night of drinking with them to help ease tensions. Next morning, his horribly mutilated body is found by the police.
As the investigation gets under way, we’re made aware of unsavoury links between Johannesburg police brass and water officials. Nomsulwa also has a stake: The Soweto police supervisor in charge of the case, Zembe, is the one who covered for her and the pipe thieves. Nomsulwa is made to do Zembe a favour: She must act as a diversionary local host for the dead man’s daughter, arriving within days from Toronto to seek answers about her father’s killing.
Claire, the “water man’s daughter” of the title, arrives in the expected haze of grief, compounded by her broad ignorance of South African society and the true nature of her father’s connections to the local power brokers. She becomes the structural hub for Ruby-Sachs’s intersecting plot lines: police procedural; a chronicle of corporate and civic corruption, and a portrait of two women, strangers, who warily bond over separate but pressing realities of loss and oppression.
With her cousin Mira and his gang contacts among the murder suspects, Nomsulwa is caught between her fractious community, her indebtedness to Zembe’s covert support of the pipeline saboteurs, and her budding sympathy for Claire. When Nomsulwa reluctantly takes Claire to the site where her father’s body was found, the suspended moments of tenderness between the two women read as an emotional turning point.
Ruby-Sachs brings her setting and its cast vibrantly to life: the parching heat, night-time chills, the dirt tracks and clinging Soweto dust, the families living in near-poverty yet touchingly house-proud, while their civic officials boast charmless mansions and giant plasma TVs. Nomsulwa’s and Zembe’s distinct personalities, and their shared burden of divided loyalties, are finely evoked.
Oddly enough for a Canadian writer coming from outside African culture, Ruby-Sachs convinces least in the rendering of her Canadian, the addled and naive Claire, who comes off consistently as a flake. Claire’s role as a device, a catalyst for the fully formed Nomsulwa, emerges as her best feature.
There are occasionally other lapses. Johannesburg’s police homicide squad seems strangely short on forensic rigour. It makes little sense that, just a week or so after the killing, with no firm leads and no arrests, the suburban backyard site where the ravaged body was found has no police cordon or any restriction on access. Similarly, it seems highly unlikely that Claire can walk into a hotel and, without even showing ID, be allowed compassionate access to the executive suite where her father spent his last night. Claire and Nomsulwa linger in the room unsupervised while Claire tears the bed apart and stuffs her pockets with toiletries. The bellhop who admits them to the suite simply disappears from the scene.
A fresh lead in the case leads to an incriminating blood sample, placing Nomsulwa and investigator Zembe in a painful bind. A cascade of events follows, 40 pages that gather up the story’s themes and plot strands in ways completely unexpected, and exhilarating. Ruby-Sachs shifts from the tease of redemptive reconciliation to a stripped-down, tightly paced finale that doesn’t shrink from the full human cost of systemic inequity and corruption.
Jim Bartley is The Globe and Mail’s first-fiction reviewer.
