The Ghost of Sam Webster Review by Lindy Stiebel

Craig Higginson’s latest book The Ghost of Sam Webster is a tour de force of imagining people and place and time: set against the landscapes of Isandlwana and, to a lesser extent, the Midlands, the narrative weaves from past to present, and from character to character, all the while maintaining the grip of place on these same characters, both historic and contemporary. Listening to a recent interview held with the author[i], the primacy of place is evident for his creative thinking and writing. He mentions his school years at Michaelhouse School in Balgowan, nestled in the Midlands, and these we see transposed onto the novel’s teenage children who are at unnamed Midlands schools (probably St Anne’s private school for girls, and Michaelhouse, its counterpart for boys). The family lodge, set in the Isandlwana and Fugitive’s Drift area, is where most of the narrative action takes place. The haunted landscape of Isandlwana, with the ‘totemic’ lion mountain, looms large for the family and , indeed, all the characters. It is a landscape saturated with blood and violence from the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879 and, in the narrative present, the deaths that occur in the novel.

In summary, The Ghost of Sam Webster uses the theatrical technique of multiple narrators each telling their side of things (both in the past and present eras), such that the ending came – for me at least – as a complete surprise. The central ‘writer’, Daniel Hawthorne, who is the connecting tissue between past and present narratives, leaves packing up his mother’s house in Johannesburg to visit his friend Bruce Webster in Zululand. He does this upon hearing of the mysterious disappearance of his friend’s daughter, Sam, whose body washed up on the banks of a flooded river nearby her family battlefields lodge. Under the guise of researching the history of his disgraced ancestor, Lt Charles Hawthorne, soldier and lepidopterist, Daniel travels to the tourist lodge to write and do research, and finds a family unravelling. Family and societal pressures are shown to be present for both ancestor and descendant; and particularly become evident in the efforts to uncover the truth of what happened to the wayward Sam, her devoted brother Matthew, her increasingly alcoholic and unfaithful mother Caroline, and the family lynchpin, the guardian of the Isandlwana lodge and its history, Bruce Webster. At the same time, the doomed love affair of Daniel’s ancestor and his desertion of his post to save another (and himself) forms the novel’s overall leitmotif. All is not as it seems. Higginson’s gift is that he manages to keep the threads weaving through the constructed loom of the various characters’ voices, both black and white, male and female, past and present. To achieve this required a longer than usual novel, according to the author, who describes this work as ‘big-boned’ and ‘epic’ in length – to begin with at least – at 120,000 words.

This is a novel which is at one level a murder story, and at another a psychological family drama, and at yet another an historical reimagining of a famous battle full of violence and vigour, and finally, for me, a novel about the power of landscape as ‘setting’. In his situating himself in South Africa, and KwaZulu-Natal more specifically as ‘heartland’, Higginson says in the interview alluded to above that ‘place matters’ and, more specifically South Africa: ‘this is my landscape; these are my people’.

It is no wonder that William Faulkner is one of his writing influences – that writer of doomed families and characters of the American South. Perhaps, like the exiled South African writer Lewis Nkosi who also cited Faulkner as ‘my real ancestor’[ii], Higginson found in his literary hero a voice from the South, another South, who could have come from nowhere else but the landscape about which he wrote. Like these writers before him, Higginson’s voice is distinctive and his use of dialogue masterful. Roots are important to this writer: he writes from an acute sense of his rootedness in a deeply complex historic and contemporary South Africa where personal relationships between genders and races, between parents and children, employers and employees are often strained in a harsh, yet beautiful, landscape which seems to have the final say.

It comes as no surprise that Higginson mentions that he has built a holiday home in Nottingham Road with money inherited from his mother, and named the house ‘Little Gidding’ after the poem by T.S Eliot. There is a circularity about tales told in The Ghost of Sam Webster that is expressed in Eliot’s lines which Higginson quotes in the interview:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started 
And know the place for the first time. 

In The Ghost of Sam Webster, Higginson has shown his maturity as a novel writer; one can only look forward to what comes next.