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Green Lion by Henrietta Rose-Innes
Umuzi
264 pages
R240
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The grand spectacle of extinction plays out in the fierce and compassionate fourth novel from Henrietta Rose-Innes, one of the great novelists working in South Africa today.
The Green Lion can be read on many levels, but the most important is the human drama of her characters. Schoolboy friends Con and Mark are strangely reunited by fate, and the last black-maned lions on the planet. Con steps in to work at a lion centre on Table Mountain after Mark is mauled. Con will stumble into a relationship with Sekhmet, the last remaining lioness. He will recoil within a relationship with his spoilt actress girlfriend, stumbling into a cult that worships wild animals.
It’s the ability of Rose-Innes to plot a narrative with textured characters – with emotions, smells, stubborn streaks – that will keep you turning the pages.
The novel considers the preservation of species, quagga bred back from extinction, as a conundrum of our time. At the lion centre, man’s tenuous but ancient relationship with nature is as much on display as the lions.
But more so on the mountain that looms above Cape Town’s classist psyche.
The subtle political critique in Rose-Innes’ work is just as pronounced here as in her previous novel Nineveh. It plays out on an oblique, almost Ballardian, level.
The Table Mountain of The Green Lion is a place fenced off to preserve the last of our wildlife. It is corporatised, protected, but readily accessible to wealthy packs of visiting hunters. Along the fence, shanty homes have risen.
Whether the fence is keeping the animals in or out and whether the animals are the humans or the wildlife are two of the questions the novel poses as it stretches into a cultish dimension – and finally a mythological one.
Did Sekhmet ever exist, except in our collective, mythological memory?
And memory and loss are at the centre of this immaculately conceived book that is as grand as it is personal, and more of a roar than a purr.
