The best books draw you into worlds you didn’t know existed and then change your own world view. Laura Fish’s evocative and immersive third novel does exactly this.
After a sudden and shocking tragedy, Koliwe Dlamini takes a job as an aid worker in the land of her father’s birth. Eswatini is a land-locked country to the east of South Africa. Here we accompany Koliwe as she simultaneously searches for her identity, and tries to assuage her past. It is this dichotomy that forms the emotional axis of the novel.
Fish’s Eswatini is not for the fainthearted: this is land ravished by the poverty of post-colonialism, populated by vapid and venal expats, and steeped in the AIDS crisis. Fish draws us into a world riven with visceral pain and despair, beautifully skewered by her poetic use of language.
It’s a novel rich in duality. Grief and guilt accompany Koliwe’s journey as we travel from rural England to Eswatini’s administrative capital of Mbabane. The tension between her English and Swazi backgrounds plays out in a splintering of two personas: the English-raised Koliwe and the more ephemeral and largely silent Xolile who struggles to be at one with her homeland.
Koliwe’s grief hangs over the novel as we follow her into the world of hypocritical values within the aid community. Fish is particularly adept at allowing grief to pervade the atmosphere so that we sense it without the author needing to constantly articulate the emotion.
As Koliwe’s work gets underway, her self-satisfaction, gained from dispensing AIDS medication and food parcels, gives way to frustration, self-disgust and a resurgence of the guilt she hoped she’d left behind in England. She witnesses an attack on a young woman while on an outreach visit and, instead of leaving the safety of her car to help the victim, she flees the scene, waits and finally reports it to a disinterested police department.
Koliwe constantly seesaws between seeking comfort and offering salvation. She finds the former in the dubious company of her Scottish boss Cameron; the emotional hold he has over her speaks to her uneasy relationship with her dual heritage. The object of her salvation is Thandi, the child head of a family, who lives with her siblings in poverty.
Koliwe wants to atone for the tragedy from which she fled England by helping people in her father’s homeland, but she has trouble fully grasping her role within the UK Aid community there, and the intricacies of corruption within that system. Her grief and constant introspection often prevent her from connecting with her roots. When she finally unites with her Swazi family, she is forced to confront the sparring facets of her life, and battle for resolution and justice both for herself and those whom she seeks to protect.
Sadly, Fish died earlier this year. The beautiful and sombre tone is all the more poignant for knowing that Lying Perfectly Still was her final completed book. It is a haunting and elegiac epitaph to an extremely talented writer.
By Fiona McAuslan
Lying Perfectly Still by Laura Fish is published by Fly on the Wall Press. For more information, click here.
