Like Clockwork by Margie Orford
A Review/Interview by Moira Richards

Dr. Clare Hart is a thirty-something investigative reporter with a doctorate in criminal psychology and currently immersed in her research work for a documentary about the trafficking of women through Africa. She is also a specialist in the tracking of murderers and rapists, and the South African Police Service sometimes hires her profiling expertise.

When the body of a pretty teenager is found, sadistically murdered and displayed grotesquely on the beachfront, Captain Rediwaan Faizal asks her assistance to find the killer. When the body of a second young woman is found a few days later in almost the same spot, Clare and Rediwaan know for sure that Cape Town has a serial murderer on the loose and that it will just be a matter of time before he kills again.

Like Clockwork is a crime thriller that also takes the reader into the lucratively misogynist parts of South Africa's most beautiful city-- the city (rather ironically) that is affectionately known as the country's "Mother City."

Hi Margie-- I spent an entire Saturday reading Like Clockwork and found it an unputdownable and thoroughly enjoyable whodunnit. The novel received similar reviews in the South African press, but I think too, that there is a lot more to it than the fast-paced serial-crime story.

I felt while reading this novel, a sense of... pollutedness encroaching on me. Perhaps this was because I am a woman, I don't know. I noticed too, that your protagonist, the police profiler Clare Hart, was narrated many, many times taking a shower.

I am glad that you the book kept you out of trouble for a whole Saturday. I often feel tainted, corrupted by how violent our society is-- and yes this is a way of cleansing. I always have thought of rape victims who are told not to shower or wash after an assault. Their skin must crawl with the traces of their attacker.

Clare's apartment too is a haven, almost a cloister. So washing is a way of cleansing. It is also a way, I think, of keeping herself separate. It is not always easy to keep a perspective-- because rape (and murder, obviously) completely negates the humanity of the other person (the victim) it is hard to be surrounded by so many raped women and not feel that de-humanization happening to you by association.

I am a seasoned and bloodthirsty whodunnit reader, yet as I read through Like Clockwork I found myself unusually drawn into, involved with, and angered by the killings in this book. Your biographical note mentions that Like Clockwork was inspired by the research you did for an article on the trafficking of women for South Africa's sex industry. You seem to have made from an escapist genre, a hard-hitting story of crime?

This book was born out of anger-- I had done a lot of journalist research into sex crimes, sex work, trafficking rape survivors. And I needed somewhere to put it all-- hence the book. I think that is where the spookiness comes from-- that I was and remain very angry about what happens. I also wanted to explore how the abuse of women is legitimized, normalized is maybe a better word, by its ubiquity.

Violence against women is something that bothers me very much. But I also want to understand it-- what does it feel like to have it happen to you; what does it feel like to live with it for years and years; how does one become so used to it. But most of all I wanted to know why people do it. It is obviously an enjoyable pastime for fun, crucial to a certain trope of masculinity, a stress release, of route to power, to desire and bliss.

I was interested, as a novelist in that moment of violence. In what it feels like to have it done to you, and what it feels like to do it. There is something very compelling about the license to do what you like because you can. I wondered about that, and tried to write a novel about the unleashing of desires that are best contained. I also wanted to get a feel for what it is like to die at the hands of someone who has no care or cognizance for the life or feelings of his victim.

There is a strange ambivalence too about the rape of women-- it is at once shocking and titillating. It is the logic of much pornography, but also a very old metaphor around desire and innocence. So complex. The crime genre also forces one to develop a story through action and dialogue-- which makes one really observe the nuances of power-- it made me at any rate.

The fictional Clare Hart's doctoral dissertation was entitled "Crimes against Women in Post-Apartheid in South Africa." One of the other characters speaks at some point about, "... [M]en from my country ... we make our money from our women." I counted explorations of, mentions of, allusions to at least a dozen different forms of women abuse in your book, yet the novel never reads like a lecture. It is fine art the way you couched your protest about what is going on in South Africa today, so palatably in a fiction genre form.

South Africa is a very very dangerous place for women to live-- all our lives are curtailed, "Talibanned" as it were, by crime one could say, so choosing this genre was a way of writing about that. Describing what it feels like to live in a city besieged by violence and fear.

There is an irony to writing crime in South Africa-- the genre is escapist, yes, and also fantastical. The upset of the body on the first page of the thriller is resolved and order is restored by the end-- it is a fairy tale genre in many ways. However, in South Africa where violence and criminality are so rampant there is a frisson about how close, how real a crime story might be.

I remember when I first returned to South Africa (from New York in 2001) having this almost hallucinatory feeling of being attacked. This would happen if I read a newspaper report, or heard something on the radio, and thought about it. Later if my husband touched me or made love to me I would have this awful feeling of morphing into one of the women I had read about. He would too, a gentle man I have lived with for twenty years, become strange to me. My skin would crawl with the horror of it, the sameness to which violence reduces the unique self.  It was a dreadful feeling. In some ways I exorcised it in my book.

In some ways too perhaps, you are Clare Hart who reduces the power of the unseen threats to her existence by facing them rather than trying to flee them?

This was one brief motive-- I wanted to write about how South Africa is, rather than how it should be, or how it was. It is an extremely violent place, and one that is punitively dangerous to women and girls. When I returned to South Africa (from my stint as a Fulbright scholar at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and ten years in Namibia) I was besieged by an almost unbearable sense of fear. It was a fear of the brutality that we read about. I am also the mother of three daughters-- of an age of the girls who die in my novel-- so on a very personal and visceral level I wanted to face that fear, give it a location (a real body, as it were) and also, specifically, to understand the perpetrators.

You explore and even foreground the empowerment of women in the novel. Not all of the female characters remain victims of crime. Some of them, in a number of different ways, transform themselves into survivors of the violences perpetrated against them, and more importantly, free themselves of the criminals who perpetrated those crimes.

It was very interesting, to work through those notions of solidarity amongst women, and also the wiliness and strength with which a woman can outwit a threat to herself. I like Clare's isolated confidence and her determined isolation. I am also interested in women who have a strong, vengeful sense of justice. It is hard to just shoot your way out of a bad situation as a woman. So I thought-- how will she use her mind, her knowledge of the dark secrets of others (and her own) to track down a killer.

On the flip side too, was my notion of "a few good men (and women)," people who do not harm others just because they can-- hence Rediwaan Faizal and other male characters who work with and around Clare Hart.

Thank you Margie, for taking the time to talk with me about your work. You do seem to have a successful approach to the crime-fiction genre (I know there is another Clare Hart novel due out soon), and it seems that the genre is an ideal way to complement the serious aspects of your nonfiction and documentary film work. I hope to see many more thrillers from you!

Oh yes, it is exhilarating writing in the crime-fiction genre. It is so new in South Africa but so apt given the ropey state of our nation. Writing crime gives me the sense that I can write about how it feels to be living here now.

Fiction is stories for grown-ups. But stories weave the social and emotional fabric that binds us together; that we use to make sense of ourselves, of the psychic geography of where we live. Stories-- fiction-- allow us to say what we fear most and to then order it in a way that allows us to feel safe at the end.
 

This piece was originally published in the WSQ: Women™s Studies Quarterly 35: 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 2007).

Moira Richards
Google "Moira Richards" to find links to her essays on Women Abuse, her reviews of woman-authored books as well as to other writing and editing work she does for various print and e-publications. She can often be found lounging about the staff rooms of womenwriters.net, absolutewrite.com and moondance.org - usually sipping tea, sometimes Jack Daniels. Off-line, she writes accounting textbooks and a poem or two.


Margie Orford
Margie Orford is an award winning journalist, writer and film director, and author of children's fiction, nonfiction and school textbooks. She grew up in South Africa and while at the University of Cape Town, she wrote for the frequently-banned student publication, Varsity. She was detained during the State of Emergency in 1985 and wrote her final exams in prison. She was an editor of the Feminist Press's Women Writing Africa, the Southern Volume and recently completed How to Be Fabulous: A Tongue-In-Cheek Self Help Book For Women In Their 40s And 50s' (Spearhead/NAB, 2006). Like Clockwork is her first thriller, and the next in the series, Blood Rose, came out to wonderful reviews in September 2007. So far Like Clockwork has been translated into Czech, Russian, German (print run of 100 000 copies), and Dutch. And Margie has a very exciting new French deal for three books-- with Payot and Rivages. They are the first to buy the rights to Daddy's Girl, the book she is currently working on which is due for completion at the end of 2008.