South
Babak Lakghomi
Dundurn Press, 2023
Review by Simon Lowe
Babak Lakghomi’s sharp-edged, jewel-like novel, South, cuts as cleanly as it sparkles. A minimalist, literary dystopia recalling the sparse, unexplained mysteries of JG Ballard’s early catastrophe novels, South charts the hallucinatory descent of a journalist caught in the spiraling madness of totalitarian rule.
B visits an oil rig in the nearly uninhabitable desert country, the South, to report on worker unrest. He has recently finished writing a book about his father, a former union worker and poet who disappeared when B was a child. B isn’t a crusading reporter seeking to expose state brutality. He usually avoids conflict of this nature. Despite his reticence for action, B leaves behind a strained marriage and finds himself travelling through villages devastated by drought where “salt was inseparable from the soil” and the locals cure disease by channelling wind spirits. When he arrives at the oil rig— “a chandelier made of wire,” he is an unwanted guest.
B appears as featureless as the landscape, operating only as a lens. He describes his surroundings but provides no opinion or context. On his way to the rig, he stays in a village where he witnesses a strange ritual. Bamboo sticks dipped in blood, a man convulsing under a cloth. “His scream made something thump inside my ears,” B notes, his only reaction to the encounter. These taut descriptions create a distancing effect. We watch unseen through a keyhole, trying to make sense of the strangeness being depicted.
Literary dystopias usually operate as a cautionary tale, a forewarning of future nightmares, told with taxonomic detail, an exercise in compare and contrast. In South, Lakghomi is doing something altogether different. By omitting details, and refusing to engage in exposition, he focuses on the psychological impact of living in an ecologically ruined world, governed by surveillance and state control. With this comes a dizzying, horrifying uncertainty. Like walking through a never-ending tunnel, you’re never quite sure when, or if, a crack of light is going to appear.
In South, many of the characters are known by their titles, not their names. B’s roommate on the rig is the Assistant Cook, who introduces him to an uncooperative, tightlipped crew. “I got your back,” he says but it isn’t long before the Assistant Cook has himself disappeared. B’s laptop and phone are taken by the Secretary and any future correspondence with the Editor and B’s wife are closely monitored. Like the novel itself, B keeps his messages short, bereft of detail or emotion, opinionless and stark. “It’s a long way, but I got here safely,” he tells his wife and little else. In the South, language has to be stripped and redacted for fear of reprisals, making the effect of Lakghomi’s direct, unadorned prose truly immersive and troubling. I was reminded of Samanta Schweblin’s searingly intense, Fever Dream, which, like South, uses tone and omittance to cause a tightening in the throat and pinching of the pages as the horror unfolds.
With B’s article going nowhere (“nobody talked to me”), he receives a message from the Publisher regarding the book he has written about his father — “my attempt to find out who he was, to understand why he left.” Despite previously expressing enthusiasm for B’s initial draft, “The Publisher wanted a different manuscript now.” It’s at this point we realize South is a mystery novel as much as a dystopian one, and we have been offered up clues like morsels almost too small to taste. The guileless B, more victim than protagonist, seems unaware of the extent to which he is being manipulated, as he spends more time in his cabin sleeping for longer than he normally would. Instead, thoughts of B’s fate occur only in the reader. Is he being poisoned on the rig? Why was he chosen for this assignment? What threat, if any, does B pose to the state? Could it be to do with an article he wrote on ornithology and painted storks? His missing father? Lakghomi generates a sly sense of paranoia in readers; we start to suspect everything might somehow be connected to the state. A chance meeting B has with a woman smoking a cigarette on the deck no longer seems like a chance meeting. B has an affair with a mysterious woman he meets in his favourite bookstore, but when they go back to her place, he’s surprised to see she doesn’t own any books. The element of mystery reveals itself in its own dystopian fashion, like an Agatha Christie novel without a detective.
One of B’s few possessions on the rig is The Book of The Winds. He reads its strange, surreal descriptions of possession by wind spirits in his cabin. Here, in extracts, language switches to allegorical fantasy. Exorcism rituals are described where “some winds require a larger ceremony and more blood to be spilled for the wind to be exorcised.” B’s father left behind a notebook, most of which was a dream log tracing visionary illusions of an altering world— “paper birds turn into ash.” The contrast between the helpless facticity of B’s experience on the rig and the hallucinatory prose in The Book of The Winds, B’s father’s notebook, and then, later B’s own notes, where “fishermen searched for God with their hook shaped hands,” offers further gnomic clues about the role of wind spirits and the nature of the South’s environmental decline. The texts within the novel also reveal the power of words and imagination erased from the South. Perhaps this is what the state fears the most and why they have so elaborately singled out B for their inquiries: not because he will expose the truth about his father or reveal the cause of the environmental meltdown, but in case he might be a poet too.
Lakghomi is an Iranian-Canadian author who left Iran two years after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s 2005 election victory, a period that saw crumbling human rights. South’s strange, captivating appeal lies in the sense of helpless erosion facing B, where names are replaced by roles and clandestine operators monitor every attempt at expression. In his notebook, B writes, “he swam through the leaves and rose toward the light but still couldn’t breathe.” This could be a description of how it feels to read South, a compliment to the harrowing freedom of language, its ability to imperil and empower, imprison, and emancipate. Now, at a time of environmental crisis, authoritarian leadership, and creeping surveillance, South highlights the danger and necessity of finding our voice, before it’s too late.
Simon Lowe is a British author and freelance writer. His reviews have appeared in Rain Taxi, Full Stop, Cleveland Review of Books, The Guardian (UK), and elsewhere. His novel, The World is at War, Again (Elsewhen Press) was published in 2021. https://www.simonlowebooks.com/