Nadia Davids

Nadia Davids' Cape Fever features a heroic protagonist, a cartoonishly evil antagonist, a fantasy revenge plot, and some vague, incomplete, allusions to some kind of mystical Gothic context, all jumbled together to provide a deeply predictable narrative. She's leaning heavily on the sympathetic context of her protagonist, which is is tremendous and well-rooted in history. Unfortunately, the excessively blue prose does not fulfill this outline, and instead, detracts from it.

Set in Cape Town, show more South Africa in the 1920s, Davids' story begins when the protagonist, Soraya, a young Muslim woman, takes a job as a maid for Mrs. Hattingh, an elderly English lady who lives alone in a vast, crumbling mansion. Soraya is the eldest child in a small family, her father is a calligrapher who makes holy art meant to ward off evil and bad luck, her mother is a washerwoman, and her fiance, Nour, the brightest boy in the Muslim Quarter, is doing backbreaking labour at a farm to save money so he can become a teacher. Soraya needs the job desperately to support her family, and so does not dispute it when Mrs. Hattingh pulls the rug under her at the first interview and tells her she will have to be a live-in maid, instead of coming in during the day. Soraya gets her own room for the first time and keeps telling herself she has it good: there are no sleazy men like her last job, her room has a bolt so she's safe at night, and the work is not very demanding as Mrs. Hattingh is a creature of habit, if rude. "Your people are so modest," says Mrs. Hattingh, "Some of your people are very intelligent, you know" and so on.

Over time, Mrs. Hattingh's superficial kindness becomes an imposition: she demands personal information from Soraya in the form of chats, insists that she needs her so that Soraya can't go home, condescends to her and talks down to her in the guise of taking an interest, and so on. Soraya, on her mother's advice, holds something back from Mrs. Hattingh's avarice: she doesn't tell Mrs. Hattingh she can read, because some settlers resent that in their servants. This comes back to bite: Mrs. Hattingh, nosily poking into Soraya's life, offers to help write letters to her fiance, and Soraya must accept, seem ungrateful to her employer by refusing, or admit the lie. She accepts, but Mrs. Hattingh won't let her see the letters she dictates, or the replies. Soraya soon figures out that Mrs. Hattingh is lying about what she's writing, and what Nour is writing back when Soraya's engagement starts falling apart.

In the meantime, Mrs. Hattingh's own focus is her son, who survived the Great War, and now lives in London. Soraya is constantly preparing the house for an upcoming visit from the son, which keeps getting postponed, and Mrs. Hattingh's accounts of him grow increasingly unbelievable. Why won't her son visit? Why does the stories about what he's doing in England keep changing? At the conclusion of this book, Soraya will find answers to both, the content of the letters and the story behind the son. There's also a lot about some ghosts that Soraya can apparently see, a random appearance by an Irish seer who tries to bond with Soraya over mutual colonial suffering for half a chapter and then disappears, never to be heard of again, and a Dorian-Gray-esque painting of a woman that she talks to while she dusts. None of these pay out, but they help create the exact fantasy of the mystical Oriental 'other' that Davids is clumsily trying to critique in Mrs. Hattingh - a poor native whose knowledge is intuitive and supernatural and superstitious.

Davids writes Mrs. Hattingh like a heightened parody of the racist but ostensibly kind mistress, saying things like "Some of your people are terribly smart," constantly expecting gratitude for the bare minimum of gestures, displaying an arrogant ignorance of the actual racism around her while being involved in 'good works' and so on. Davids may as well have named her Mrs Benevolent Racism, like someone in Pilgrims' Progress because she has no other characteristics. On the other hand, Soraya would be Mystical Brave Oppressed Brown Woman, because there's no trope that she doesn't fulfill on her end. She seems more like a colonial fantasy than a real person, a brave feminist rebel imagined through the eyes of a well-intentioned British liberal, a 1920s woman with the sensibilities and values of a 21st century Twitter celebrity. She is written entirely as a symbol of oppression in opposition to colonialism, and not as a person apart from that.

I find this very unfortunate, because Davids clearly wrote this novel as a critique of colonial oppression, and has instead reinforced many orientalist tropes that should have died years ago. The history of resistance to colonial rule in South Africa is so incredibly rich and offers much to a writer who wants to present it in a sensitive, thoughtful manner. Instead, she has clumsily given us some Rumer Godden type fantasy of a supernaturally-powerful native woman who uses her powers to exact revenge on the whites, the kind of story that British memsahibs used to read to frighten each other. This is not transgressive or new, it is just two ends of the same caricature stick. The additional, meandering attempt to capitalise on the current trend of Gothic feminist horror is not written well either (did we really need an Irish lady who only appears to defraud the white settlers by pretending to see dead people, make a very obvious point about the English in Ireland, say a few Hail Marys, drink some tea at the kitchen table, and then disappear from the plot?).

I think Davids would be better served by redirecting her attention to the audience she is writing for. These books don't have to be written to cater to the English publishing market, including the tropes that are presently marketable. Nor does the writing style have to be of the blindingly obvious variety, talking down to the reader as if they were idiots needing every little thing explained. The complex history of racism and rebellion in South Africa deserves better treatment. show less

"In a small, unnamed colonial city of the 1920s, Soraya Matas is hired by the eccentric Mrs. Hattingh as a maid. Consequently, Soraya is kept from her family for weeks and then months at a time. Presuming Soraya cannot read or write, Hattingh offers to write letters to Nour, Soraya's fiancé, on her behalf. But the seemingly vulnerable and generous Mrs. Hattingh is not all that she appears..."

This one checks all the boxes for a great Gothic read. A haunted, decaying mansion; isolation; loss show more of innocence; grief; psychological torment; domestic power imbalance, all of it! That is not to say that it doesn't stand on its own merits. The protagonist and narrator, Soraya, comes from a family of spiritual Muslims, who connect deeply to their past, their oral history, sacred rituals, and folk beliefs. Although they subsist on very little, her family, and those of The Quarter, are rich in community and solidarity. Her wary family knows of her "gift of discernment," for which she is neither exploited nor shamed by. She is respectful of the ghosts that she "sees," but consequently is drawn into the world of Mrs. Hattingh and her secrets.

At first, Soraya considers Alice Hattingh a fair employer, and even defends her from time to time, in spite of herself. Mrs. Hattingh's white saviorist, "mother-knows-best" attitude grates on Soraya, but it isn't wholly antagonistic. Mrs. Hattingh insists on keeping house for her son - who suspiciously keeps delaying his arrival - and she refuses to share Nour's letters with Soraya directly. Of course, Soraya must bite her tongue to keep her family afloat. But one night, the mask slips and when all is revealed, it is worse than Soraya can imagine. I don't know what I would've done in Soraya's situation, but I was cheering her on when all hell broke loose. What a spooky season privilege this one was! show less

4.25 Stars — CAPE FEVER is a wonderfully tense gothic suspense novel set in the 1920s, in a place similar to colonial South Africa. It delves into the uneasy relationship between a young Muslim woman working as a housekeeper, and her employer, a British widow living in a crumbling haunted house. The writing is beautiful, and I loved the simmering dread that built up in the story as things deteriorated between the two women. This is a fascinating read that explores colonialism, class, love, show more and maybe most of all, the heaviness of grief. I enjoyed the complex characters and the overall unsettling tone of the book. Thought-provoking and memorable. show less

Cape Fever by Nadia Davids is a gothic tale of desire and revenge set in 1920s South Africa. Soraya is hired as the live-in house maid and companion to Mrs Hattingh in a grand house in an unnamed British colony which could easily be Cape Town.

The novel begins in a seemingly familiar upstairs downstairs historical fiction style plot I've read and loved before. The list of daily, weekly, fortnightly and monthly chores Soraya is expected to carry out feed this fascination and the class show more distinction is clear.

Separated from her betrothed and letting Mrs Hattingh believe she can't read or write, Soraya accepts a generous offer from her employer to write a letter to him once a week on her behalf. This becomes a weekly ritual for both women that seems genuine and generous in the beginning as they sit together, read his reply and compose a response.

"It's as though she's shown me a door, told me about the riches that lie beyond it, opened it very slightly, enough for the warm gold glow behind it to spill out, just a little, with both of us knowing she can shut it whenever she likes." Page 73

Soraya comes from a Muslim community and the juxtaposition of the two cultures is ever present, with Mrs Hattingh continuing to assert her dominance and superiority at every opportunity. The writing is evocative and I particularly enjoyed her description of smells. I'm going to include the full quote here so that you can enjoy it and I can read it again and again in the future.

Soraya notices that in big houses with high ceilings and long corridors, the smells of people disappear into nothing.

"In the Quarter, smells stay. There's the smell in our houses of incense burning both now and fifty years ago, of a thousand meals past and the ones bubbling on stoves this minute. Sticking to every wall, woven into every curtain, the reek of chopped onions and pressed garlic, the trace of scattered methi, diced chilies, dried bay leaves; of spices - whole, roasted, ground, cast in hot oil - and of meat braising, bones boiling, fat spitting, broth cooking, sugar burning, rose water steaming, tea brewing, mint leaves just torn, ginger beer just poured. It's the smell of more in good times and of keeping an eye in lean ones. In our house, also, the whiff of my mother's soaps, the sweet jasmine my father planted at the front gate, the sticky heat of my and my sisters' sweat, the rush of the tides my brother brings back with him from a day at the beach and the fish he carries, still on the hook, sea fresh, glassy-eyed, salt crusted, scales shining." Pages 30-31

After reading this I desperately wanted to visit Soraya's house and inhale some of those scents, and absorb the swirl of life and history that had taken place there.

Constantly in each other's company, Soraya is unable to leave her position as her family desperately need her wages to get by, yet the relationship between the two women slowly begins to sour until it reaches an exciting and unexpected climax.

"She walks away, her slight frame straight, arms soft and graceful, once a girl who would have practiced with a book on her head, and I marvel that she can so easily show me her back when the kitchen is full of knives." Page 151

Cape Fever by Nadia Davids is a slow burn gothic psychological suspense thriller about class, colonialism, power, loneliness, love, loss, grief, secrets and betrayal and I loved it. Highly recommended.

* Copy courtesy of Simon & Schuster * show less