White Lightning, by Justin Cartwright

This side of paradise

"I see that memory is a reordering of the present: it can cast a shadow forwards": this reflection by the narrator of White Lightning also defines the novel's matter and form. A deftly economical style allows Cartwright to whip back and forth through the life of his protagonist, James, filling in his past while advancing some busy action. James is a film director who has returned to his native South Africa to be with his dying mother. He is 47, alone, at a watershed. Discovering that his father had left money, he decides to buy a farm in South Africa, swept up in a vision of "my slice of paradise ... beehives and fruit trees".

James is a rum bird: a maker of soft porn whose ruminations rope in Sartre and Virgil. He has aspired to serious cinema. The soft porn is faute de mieux, but his recollections of the absurdities of low-budget filming are instructive about his conflicting personality – both serious and frivolous, concerned and detached. They also allow memories of his affair with Ulla, a fetching body-double who will turn up in the contemporary narrative. While he was in bed with Ulla, his child, Matt, died in hospital. James's marriage ended; he has been stalked by guilt ever since.

This turns out to be a time of expiation. James is drawn to needy young creatures: a little Xhosa boy suffering from Aids, a caged baboon he takes for walks on a lead. His preoccupation with the baboon winds in with his interest in his father's publications on ants and bees, which had made him into a Seventies guru.

Events eerily reflect both the ravaged condition of the country and James's own discordant persona. When he brings the boy's Xhosa family to the farm he is having renovated, the farm people – racially distinct – are resentful. The little boy is horribly killed by the baboon, a deed which may have been engineered. James becomes sexually involved with Valerie, a single mother, who turns on him when it becomes clear he is not going to make any commitment: "You think because you were sitting on your arse in Europe, somehow you're better than us." His attempts to return the baboon to the wild are frustrated by the hostility of the nearby baboon colony, who maim the creature.

All this sounds very dark. Actually, this is a novel shot through with humour. Cartwright is a dab hand at character definition, from a few lines of dialogue or a fleeting view. The contemporary setting of coastal and rural South Africa is briskly brought to life without the self-indulgence of lavish description. When he does unleash a flight of language, it is to all the more effect – as with the memory shards which conjure up seminal moments. Subsidiary figures are vividly evoked. I particularly appreciated the Filkin-Halberts, James's ex-wife and her new spouse. All told, this is fictional skill of the highest order.