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SCMP Reporter

MATING, by Norman Rush (Vintage, $72).

 NORMAN Rush's first volume of short stories, Whites, arrived to critical acclaim five years ago, examining the almost extinct ''tribes'' of white Africa. Mating, his first novel, continues the African setting.

   It is a stunning, multi-layered tale, which engulfs the reader in the ethical questions of development, and the emotional questions of an intense and vivid relationship.

  The unnamed narrator is a nutritional anthropologist, who begins the book languishing directionless in the Botswanan capital Gaborne.

  All the pleasures and pains of an expatriate lifestyle are available as she clings on to a society in which she feels displaced and insecure.

  But in the midst of her ''guilty repose'', as she describes it, she learns that Nelson Denoon, development guru, is on a secret project in Botswana.

  Denoon is a cultural maverick, able to transfix listeners with a flow of ideas that defy and refute conventional development theories.

  He is also on the verge of divorce, and our narrator, bristling with intellectual and sexual yearning, quickly regains her sense of purpose.

  She trails alone through the desert, a wonderfully evocative journey as she staves off the mental and physical exhaustion of the demanding terrain, to his secret project, Tsau, an almost self-sufficient community run by women.

  As the narrator explores Tsau, so the reader is drawn into the complex web of issues relating to development politics.

  Denoon's vision is of a community using the traditions of African tribal life and, central to the project, the sun.

  The narrator first meets Denoon at a party, where he spellbinds an audience of development workers, expatriate glitterati, government officers and politicians, with his vision of ''solar democracy''.

  ''Imagine that this country enjoys averagely two hundred and twenty days a year of pure sun pouring down, streaming down, a downpour of gold that no one stops to hold a bucket to . . . now suppose the Batswana [the main tribe in Botswana] or rather the inhabitants of this country for any reason, wanted to base every mechanical process without exception on the free energy of the sun . . . your children if you could train them, could be masters of the power of the sun. They could be a better thing than rich, they could be free.''   This is a vision of development which is not charity, and rejects the dogma of Western politics and is based on enfranchising the available - a reason Denoon gives for the matriarchal basis of Tsau.

  ''The idea behind that was to demonstrate that at least something could be done about the economic disenfranchisement of women that was taking place in the society at large as it modernised.''   Tsau is mapped in dizzying detail, from its political power base - the Sekopolo, a communal committee, to the minutiae of everyday life.

  Denoon, or rather, Rush's concept is a culmination of possibilities, developed to the full, but, and this is perhaps one of the sources of the book's fascination, never lyricised with sentimental idealism.

  The portrait is warts and all throughout, and as Mating progresses, Denoon's ideal society confronts problems ranging from whether they should import bras, to possible murder.

  But Mating is not a development thesis. The relationship between the two protagonists is the central focus of the plot.

  It is just that their relationship ranges through the emotional and intellectual. Combining the two is rare in English language literature and Rush handles the narrative with invention and control.

  Thus, the point at which the idealism of Tsau is challenged from within, acts as the fulcrum of the narrator and Denoon's relationship.

  The narrator's voice retains an intellectual ardour, that pushes boundaries in Tsau and Denoon.

  Rush presents us with a character, for whom self-examination is a way of being: ''There's always new material to be integrated into the study of me. Each moment of thought demands multiples of moments of classification.''   Mating is densely written but also immensely readable. Rush is unafraid to challenge the reader intellectually, but unlike many writers for whom that is a question of self-aggrandisement, here the fascinating flow of ideas and earthy emotional honesty serve to create a novel which deserves to be heralded, talked about and, most importantly, read.



Compelling vision of Africa's changing society