Frankie and Stankie (50 page)

Dinah's father, a maths lecturer, shouts loudly at the daily championing of apartheid on the radio. Her mother, a quieter dissenter, makes friends with Francis-the-Gardener, an Indian who helps her create a gorgeously exotic front yard. Since racism is not a part of the de Bondt household, Dinah is mystified when she is asked at school if she would ‘rather have a native girl or a koelie to make her sandwiches' (page 30). She has never heard a black woman referred to as a ‘native girl' and has no idea what a ‘koelie'
is. The novel follows Dinah through the increasingly dark days of the National Party's rule, to her marriage to a one-time political activist and the couple's arrival in sixties Britain. As Dinah grows from a thin asthmatic little girl into a bright stylish university student, she makes a succession of increasingly colourful best friends: Angela chooses the non-academic domestic science route and is displaced by a wilder friend; Catherine, the daughter of a rabidly anti-Catholic mother, eventually converts to Catholicism; and Maud is the daughter of a coalminer's wife and her racehorse-owning lover. Shortly after Dinah arrives at university in Durban she begins a three-year affair with the urbane but slippery Didi which finally ends when she realises that he has betrayed her. Her friendship with Sam leads to marriage and then to London, as Sam flees the persistent attentions of Special Branch.

The daughter of a Dutch mathematician father and a German mother, both immigrants to South Africa before the Second World War, Barbara Trapido was born in South Africa in 1941 and went on to study English Literature at the university in Durban. After graduating, she married the historian Stanley Trapido and they moved to London in 1963. She taught in primary and secondary schools in London's East End, and in a College of Further Education and a remand centre in County Durham before settling in Oxford. Barbara Trapido's first novel,
Brother of the More Famous Jack
, won a Whitbread special prize for fiction in 1982. Her fifth,
The Travelling Hornplayer
, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award in 1998.

– In her acknowledgements Barbara Trapido refers to her own childhood in the then ‘racially stratified world' of South Africa and to her life with Stan Trapido ‘whose vast knowledge of South Africa's history' has helped her to understand her country.
Frankie & Stankie
is a novel but clearly Dinah and Sam share many qualities with Trapido and her husband. Why do you think Trapido chose to write a novel rather than an autobiography? How might a memoir have differed from the novel? How firm are the boundaries between autobiography and fiction?

– In the main the novel is written in the present tense using short simple sentences. Why do you think Trapido chose this style? How effective did you find it? How would you describe the tone of the narrative?

– ‘Comfortably settled in the Lindenstrasse,
circa
1928, the Jacobsens were clearly not a political family. But they knew that Hitler was common; a common little man and grubby' (see
here
). How important is humour in the book? Are there other examples that particularly appealed to you?

– ‘In Dinah's childhood a liberal is a person who doesn't recoil at the thought of a black person drinking out of his teacups' (see
here
). Dinah's parents are regarded as liberals. How is this illustrated? To what extent have their family backgrounds shaped their views on race? Are there any other liberals in the novel? How aware is Dinah of what is going on around her when she is growing up?

    
At what point does she begin to become politically aware?

– How do attitudes towards race in 1950s South Africa emerge in the book? How effective are Trapido's methods in revealing them? How does the racism that Dinah and Sam witness in London differ from that of South Africa? What other instances of prejudices, besides racism, occur in the book?

– ‘They [the Zulus] hang on to an idea of themselves. And, while this proves both a strength and a weakness, it accounts for Lucy's allure — that she carries around a sense of herself: a sense of being who she is' (see
here
). How do the ‘English', the Afrikaners and other whites feel about themselves and their country? How strong is their sense of identity and upon what is it based?

– Sam ‘knows that the first written Afrikaans was commentaries on the Koran. So the language that Dinah's resisted learning as the medium of white fascists is really a brown person's language' (see
here
). What other versions of history has Dinah learned?

– Sam and Didi are totally different. What seems to attract Dinah to each of them? How do you account for her acceptance of Didi's bad behaviour?

– We learn much of Dinah's friends and family as she grows up, but what do we learn of her? How would you describe Dinah?

– In Chapter 1, Trapido explains who the eponymous Frankie and Stankie are. Why do you think she chose this title for her novel?

Fiction

The Smell of Apples
by Mark Behr

Gem Squash Tokoloshe
by Rachel Zadok

The Power of One
by Bryce Courtenay

Triomf
by Marlene van Niekerk

Frieda and Min
by Pamela Jooste

Salt & Honey
by Candi Miller

Non-Fiction

Boyhood: A Memoir
by J. M. Coetzee

My Traitor's Heart
by Rian Malan

A Long Walk to Freedom
by Nelson Mandela

Kaffir Boy
by Mark Mathabane

Children's book

Among an impossible list of beloved contenders, I'll go for Anna Sewell's
Black Beauty
, that overwhelming childhood weepie with its unforgettable equine narrator. A great polemical book in its burning sense of injustice, its social range, its belief in the formative power of infant experience, it reads like Dickens for animals. It grasps that our social structures, which exploit and brutalise the poor, are mirrored in the way the poor exploit and abuse their beasts of burden. There's no sentimental putting of the needs of furry friends before those of people. The treatment of animals is the barometer for how a society treats its people. And the author is no snob. A reader will never forget the torments of highly strung Ginger, who is forced, day after day, to wear the bearing rein, because Milady likes her carriage horses with heads held high. The horses all speak among themselves, but are never twee. Like the talking animals in Beatrix Potter – another author who looks stark social realities in the eye – they express themselves with elegance and restraint. And, like the creatures in George Stubbs' paintings, they are always all horse. In tracking Black Beauty's fall from the comfort and security of a landed estate, to the wretchedness of life as a hire-by-the-hour cab horse, abused and flogged half to death, the book highlights the terrible precariousness of all our lives. Wrapped in a great narrative, it sneaks in a comprehensive course on horse management and it still stands as a trumpet blast against our bone-headed, humanoid species bigotry.

Classic

Great Expectations
was the first Dickens I read and it knocked me out, from that first incredible scene in the graveyard on the marshes; a scene that plays out like cinema, before the cinema was invented. There's the orphan boy, Pip, alongside the graves; the terrorising, ravenous Magwitch, demanding food and a file for his leg-iron, the hulking silhouette of the convict ship. The book remains in my mind as a series of mythic tableaux. The two convicts, like Goya's giants, clubbing each other in the mists; the food Pip steals from his sister's larder appearing to cry out in accusation, like a talking hen in the Brothers Grimm; the gothic extravaganza of the old Miss Havisham scenario, the jilted bride in her wedding dress, her nuptial feast, embalmed in cobwebs. There's a whiff of Jacobean drama in the exquisite cruelty of it. Altogether OTT. The girl, Estella, who has no heart, is reared to break men's hearts. She and Pip are two fairy tale children at the court of the Snow Queen. There's the brilliant underpinning of Pip's mysterious rise to wealth, all founded on illusion, and the agony of watching Joe the blacksmith, noble at his forge, but humiliated in smart London; a sacrifice to Pip's aspirant gentility. The return of the convict can make your heart stop and, as always with Dickens, there's that brilliant cast of extras – Jaggers, the housekeeper, Mr Wemmick the clerk – who take up permanent residence in your head. Dickens can make the dead walk.

Contemporary book

I'm picking Angela Carter's
Wise Children
from the hat. I'm in the mood for its bowl-along, raspberry-blowing irreverence. Narrated by one of the over-the-hill, discarded twin daughters of a preening, celebrity Shakespearean actor, it's the nation's luvvie story written from below. The twins (Twins! Oh-so Shakespearean, don'cha-know?) live on the wrong side of the River Thames, with ‘Wheelchair', one of the Great Man's clapped-out, cast-off ex-wives. They have spent their lives working hard to earn a crust at the wrong end of the theatre – either got-up in spangly tights and swinging on paper crescent moons, or flogging themselves in panto. A little bit of this and a little bit of that. The tag-along, cinematic
Midsummer Night's Dream
project becomes a caravan train of misrule across the USA. It goes on for much too long and Carter's not great at dialogue. Sometimes her plots creak, but what-the-hell, she's fab. There's lots of dressing up, ‘putting on the face' as the talkie twin puts it; the whole novel is theatrical, raucous, energetic, poignantly funny; poignantly sad. It's a tour de force. It pricks a bubble of pomp and, since the great man has a whiff of Sir Laurence Olivier, think
The Prince and the Showgirl
; Larry thought Marilyn a bimbo. And think again, if you will, whether it's Larry or the bimbo whose acting genius has better stood the test of time. Rejoice. Put on the face.

Top 10

London Fields
by Martin Amis

Just for the pleasure of Keith-the-bloke's bulging eyes in the curry

house and his talk of ‘respecting the dart'. What joy!

Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen

Incessantly violated by wet shirts, etc, but for sparkle, wit, concision and energy, it's the best wish-fulfilment story on the planet.

The Dud Avocado
by Elaine Dundy

I fell in love with it at eighteen and have never dared re-read it.

Middlemarch
by George Eliot

I've never quite lost sight of Will Ladislaw, shaking light from his hair. Plus LOVE all the politics and small-town anthropology.

Kim
by Rudyard Kipling

My best, most original, knock-out, Bohemian epic. White-trash boy gone native as hero. Ethnic variety, Russian spies, cross-dressing, prototype mujahideen. India via the third-class railway carriage and the Great Trunk Road.

The Pursuit of Love
by Nancy Mitford

Gung-ho Uncle Matthew, mincing food fads and learning sex from
Ducks and Duck Breeding
. The ultimate comfort book.

Mary Swann
by Carol Shields

I read this just as I'd got interested in narrative patterning and unreliable narrators. Thought, ‘Who is this woman? Will she be my sister and my friend?'

The Secret History
by Donna Tartt

Knocks spots off any other ‘campus' novel. It takes you over. It haunts you.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain

Another ‘road' book with white-trash boy as hero. The Mississippi River on a raft. Racist boy and runaway slave. A miscrocosm of America. The first person dialect-speak is incredible. It's genius.

To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf

Reading this at nineteen was like finding God. And that line over the boeuf en daube still makes me tingle. ‘“It is a French recipe of my grandmother's,” said Mrs Ramsay'. It's the trip of that ‘said Mrs Ramsay' that still keys me into the book's magic.

Brother of the More Famous Jack

Noah's Ark

Temples of Delight

Juggling

The Travelling Hornplayer

Brother of the More Famous Jack

Winner of the Whitbread Special Prize for Fiction
With an introduction by Rachel Cusk

Stylish, suburban Katherine is eighteen when she is propelled into the
centre of Professor Jacob Goldman's rambling home and his large eccentric
family. As his enchanting yet sharp-tongued wife Jane gives birth to her sixth
child, Katherine meets the volatile, stroppy Jonathan and his older, more
beautiful brother Roger, who wins her heart. First love quickly leads to
heartbreak and sends her fleeing to Rome but, ten years on, she returns
to find the Goldmans again. A little wiser and a lot more grown-up,
Katherine faces her future.
Brother of the More Famous Jack
is Barbara Trapido's highly acclaimed and
much loved debut; a book that redefined the coming-of-age novel.