White Lightning - Hardcover

Cartwright, Justin

3.49

202 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0340821744 ISBN 13: 9780340821749

Publisher: Sceptre, 2002

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A motorcycle messenger goes into a small park in London to paint the words 'White Lightning' on the tank of his bike. This is the beginning of an extraordinary novel. It is told over the space of a few months, and in these few months one man's whole life - his failures, his successes, his longing for peace and fulfillment, his loves and his tragedies - are recounted. These memories include his film Suzi Crispin, Night Nurse, and - the darkest moment - the death of his son, which has haunted him.

He inherits a small amount of money and buys a rundown farm, where he dreams of creating an Arcadia. On the farm is a captive baboon, Piet, who becomes startlingly involved in his new life. He also has a love affair with a local woman, and becomes hauntingly involved with an African family of squatters. All the while the narrator contemplates his own life back in England and so the novel is also a sharp commentary on what Englishness means.

This is a novel about the human enterprise. It is surprising, tender, funny and utterly original.

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Review:

James Kronk, the protagnist of Justin Cartright's new novel White Lightning, is a man at the end of his tether. He has returned to South Africa, where he was born and grew up, because his mother is dying. Behind him, in London, he has left the shambles of his professional and personal life. His career as a film director, his supposed passage to redemption through art, has long since foundered and he is reduced to making promotional films for a doomed tourist resort in the Caribbean. His marriage was destroyed years ago by his womanising and by the overpowering, inescapable guilt he feels because, when his young son died, he was with one of his lovers, a body-double on a tacky soft-porn movie he was making. Back in South Africa, he sees a final chance of readjusting his life. As his mother makes her painful last journey, James buys a small farm-holding and tries to reinvent himself. He embarks on a new relationship, he involves himself with a desperately poor black family and he begins again to believe that he can make a film of worth and value.

In Cartwright’s funny, ironic and (ultimately) painfully sad novel, all of Kronk’s efforts come to nothing. The book’s title comes from Kronk’s teenage years as an athlete. Once, briefly, he was the fastest white runner of his age, nicknamed "White Lightning". As Cartwright’s complex and subtle narrative shows, he has been running all his life but has finally reached a point where he can run no more.--Nick Rennison

Review:

Justin Cartwright's hauntingly brilliant new novel ... is beautifully realised in prose that is cool and elegant, sardonic and knowing ... A profound meditation on race, politics, ageing and death - not least the death of the illusions we harbour about ourselves. It is the best novel I have read this year. (Mick Brown, Daily Telegraph)

Cartwright is a dab hand at character definition, from a few lines of dialogue or a fleeting view. The contemporary setting of coastal and rural South Africa is briskly brought to life without the self-indulgence of lavish description. When he does unleash a flight of language, it is to all the more effect - as with the memory shards which conjure up seminal moments. Subsidiary figures are vividly evoked ... this is fictional skill of the highest order. (Penelope Lively, Independent)

Apart from being a profoundly serious writer, Cartwright can also be an abrasively amusing one. Scarcely a page of this book fails to yield some pleasure. WHITE LIGHTNING is a book of substantial merit. (Francis King, Literary Review)

A quirky meditation on the relations between men and monkeys, whites and blacks and men and women ... Cartwright has stared unflinchingly at the bleak prospects for white people in South Africa today. (Maggie Gee, Sunday Times)

Cartwright is always interested in how people make sense of present-day confusions by returning to the past... At one level an excellent study of male mid-life crisis, 'White Lightning' is also about a white man's longing for contentment in a chaotic continent he barely understands. (Tablet)

Beguiling. With this novel, Cartwright, a former Whitbread Award winner has put it all together - style, story, theme - to produce something exceptional. (Giles Newington, Irish Times)

This questioning, elegiac novel is much more than another portrayal of mid-life crisis. It deserves a place beside those accounts of Africa, from Conrad to Naipaul, which encapsulate an outsider's sense of this world as both alluring and forbidding, and always only half-understood. (Times Literary Supplement)

A new novel from Cartwright is always a cause for celebration and he doesn't let us down. His use of language is as inventive as ever, his tale poignant and deeply affecting. (Northern Echo)

This is a novel about death, but also about the power of the past to resurface and influence the present when least expected ... Cartwright's formidable reputation can only be enhanced by his latest novel, with its vivid prose and dazzling imagery. (The Good Book Guide)

Subtle and moving...Cartwright weaves the story of the man and the baboon with a magicians's delicacy...White Lightning underlines the intelligence and breadth of imagination that this former Whitbread Novel of the Year winner brings to every single paragraph of his work. (Daily Mail)

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