The only thing I can find out about C.B. George is that he “has spent many years working throughout Southern Africa” and now lives in London. It is unsurprising then that his novel, The Death of Rex Nhongo is set in Africa – in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, to be precise. The title refers to the retired Zimbabwean army general (real name Solomon Mujuru), who died in a burning farmhouse in 2011, leading to questions about the nature of the death, centring around Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party.
But the book doesn’t exactly tell the Mujuru’s story. Instead it tells the story of “five marriages and one gun” in the aftermath of Mujuru’s death, bringing together the lives of a disparate cast of characters from the many social levels of Zimbabwe. It paints a country in the throes of much mystery and political upheaval, as well as the older but no less problematic issues of life under the rule of a dictator. The only common threads between the characters at first appear to be geographical (and perhaps mutual marital problems), but as the story progresses we see that despite the diversity of circumstances and goals, each is a human being at heart.
Amongst the varied cast we meet an exasperated taxi driver and his wife who are struggling against poverty, an American trying to settle with his African wife and young daughter, and a British diplomat and her husband who are struggling to adapt to their life in the guarded island of plenty in the sea of hardship that is Harare. The struggles in the book are very much personal as well as socio-political, with each character finding themselves alienated in one way or another, even from those closest to them. In painting a picture of these struggles the book doesn’t hold back, the gory hospital scene at the outset (involving a misplaced eyeball) is a signal of things to come, not a Cormac McCarthy style barrage of violence, but a harsh and gritty world in which people struggle to make ends meet. The corruption, suspicion and conspiracy of the political world are mirrored in the family lives of many of the characters, and it’s a test of their humanity (a test which not all face equally) in seeing how they come through.
The Death of Rex Nhongo is out now on Quercus Books and Lee Boudreaux Books.