Sunday Times Combined Metros 38 - 14/08/2019 05:49:35 PM - Plate:

Book Bites
THE LAW OF THE
LAWN
The Runaways ★★★★
Fatima Bhutto, Viking, R290

In SA’s leafy suburbs, the grass is

not just greener, it’s also more
political, writes Gillian Anstey

I
t’s startling to hear Jonathan Cane say
his book is somewhat autobiographical.
After all, it’s about lawns, and he’s not a
gardener, so where does he fit into it?
Furthermore, the book is dense with
references, having started life as a PhD
thesis and although it presents his
distinctive exploration of lawns in SA, it
is anything but a story of his own life.
It seems Cane is referring to his choice
of the subject, and to how lawns symbolise
everything about his upbringing that was at
odds with his passions.
“I didn’t really fit in Sandton where I
grew up; it was a very heterosexual, white,
middle-class kind of life. My parents had
this house with a big garden. We had a
gardener obviously, like all families in that
kind of world. And my dad would mow the
lawn on weekends … I think he would at
that time have preferred a more traditional
son who he could have played rugby in the
garden with, who would have mowed the
lawn with him and would have known how
to fix the lawnmower. I didn’t fit into any of
that space.”
Another clue to his autobiographical
connection lies in an end note which
expands on a comment in the book about
how humans, unlike plants, move across
landscapes and lawns in “prescribed and
non-prescribed ways” such as “Don’t sleep
on the lawn (especially if you are black)”.
The end note lists some rules attached to
38/39
From the daughter of Pakistani political
martyr Murtaza Bhutto comes a timeous
novel that seeks to explore why young
people become jihadists. Fatima Bhutto’s
titular characters find themselves in the
Iraqi desert fighting for the Muslim
brotherhood but the novel’s beauty, and its
power, lies in the stories of how they got
there. Sunny’s Indian father moved to
England to give his family a better life, but
Sunny grapples with racism, sexuality and
belonging. Anita Rose lives in the slums of
Karachi, where her mother is a masseuse
for wealthy women and her revolutionary
neighbour stokes her anger with radical
poetry. On the other side of Karachi lives
sweet, privileged Monty, whose mother
discards servants on a whim and whose
father thinks him a coward. When their
worlds collide, it makes for a vivid story of
vulnerability and violence.
Anna Stroud @annawriter_
Jonathan Cane’s postgrad education includes drama, management, art, graphics, history...
Picture: Sebabatso Mosamo
The Great Successor: The Secret Rise
and Rule of Kim Jong Un ★★★
Anna Fifield, John Murray, R325
Civilising Grass: diverse fields has created a consummate
The Art of the interdisciplinary academic and, socially —
Lawn on the thanks also to his eloquence— a
South African knowledgeable conversationalist.
Highveld It helps that his recent field of interest is
★★★★ so accessible. Many have a story about
Jonathan Cane, lawns, not least a woman at his recent book

lawns at the type of private school he
attended, for example, Bishops Diocesan
College, where “no student may walk on
the first team rugby field called ‘Piley Rees’
and only prefects can walk on the grass
paths that link classrooms and buildings”.
It was while gazing at a lawn that Cane
— well, actually his friend and then
colleague at Vega School — hit on the idea
of the thesis. “Zen Marie and I had gone for
drinks with our students and were sitting at
the Zoo Lake Bowling Club and I said, ‘Why
don’t we make a film about the lawn here?’
(They had made a short video about the M1
bridge in Joburg). And he said no, it’s not a
film about the lawn, this is your
dissertation. And we both knew instantly.”
Cane says the perfectly flat, perfectly
green lawn with people playing bowls
represented “all these things that had been
bothering me that I wanted to think through”.
Seven years later, in 2017, he graduated
Wits Press, R380
from Wits as a doctor of philosophy in
history of art with Civilising Grass - The
Art of the Lawn on the South African
Highveld, and now Wits University Press
has published the book version.
His route to that PhD, however, was
anything but conventional.
Initially a varsity drop-out — he didn’t
enjoy his year of drama at Wits — he opted
for a graphic design diploma. Then, despite
not having an undergraduate degree, he
obtained a postgraduate diploma in
management and later an honours in
African history, both from UCT. Then he
talked his way into being accepted into
studying history of art at Wits, where his
initial postgrad diploma was upgraded to a
master’s and then a doctorate.
The upside of this progression through
launch who said her mother planned to sell
the family home because it no longer
boasts a sumptuous lawn.
Civilising Grass looks at lawns in terms
of its politics and failures, its representation
in literature and art and, in the chapter
titled ‘No Fucking up/on the Lawn’, its use
as a site for “public homosexual sex,
vagrancy, drugging and informal trading”.
It covers the likes of Douglas
Calderwood, whose 1953 doctoral thesis on
native housing in SA formed the basis for
townships’ matchbox houses with private
gardens; and it quotes Julius Malema, then
president of the ANC Youth League,
declaring: “Citizens cannot complain about
the lack of service delivery while watering
the lawn in front of an RDP house.”
But most of all, Cane’s thesis-turned-
book will ensure that anyone who reads it
will never look innocently at a South
African Highveld lawn again.
Mystery, untruths and propaganda follow
both Kim Jong Un and North Korea, the
country he controls with an iron fist.
Journalist and author Anna Fifield does a
good job of unravelling the truths. She
begins by exploring how Kim Jong Un was
raised to be a ruler by his father Kim Jong Il,
who readied him for political power as a
child. It’s a fascinating version of a family
and country the world knows little about.
Fifield credits a number of sources who
were not only close to the Kim dynasty,
but also ordinary North Koreans who have
experienced the hardships of living under
the Kim clan. That, however, does not
mean everybody is unhappy. Fifield
highlights that although shut out from the
world, many North Koreans remain loyal to
their supreme leader. Jessica Levitt @jesslevitt

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38 LifeStyle 18•08•2019 Sunday Times