Green Lion

Green Lion by Henrietta Rose-Innes is one of those books that languished for far too long on my TBR pile, and I'm so glad I've taken the time to rectify this unfortunate state of affairs. This story is told entirely from the point of view of Con, recently returned from working as a security guard in UK museums and trying to find employment.The novel fluidly leaps between past to present as we learn of Con's troubled friendship with Mark, and the dysfunctional relationship Con shares with his late mother. His situation with his girlfriend Elyse is on shaky ground too, and their unequal relationship becomes more of an issue as the story unfolds. Con himself is remote, passive – he tends to immersion in his outsider status, incapable of ever truly connecting with the people around him, despite his desire to do so. His absent father haunts the periphery of his life, while Con himself gives the appearance of envying his friend Mark, who has it all when it comes to family and wealth. I'd hazard to say that Con's fascination with Mark may even have deeper roots – that he isn't willing to admit even to himself. Mark is everything that Con isn't, to the point where he feels that association with that which he desires most may create a form of sympathetic magic to enrich his own life.Green Lion is richly textured, flavoured with evocative alchemical imagery, and it's also a story that is hard to pin down – providing one hallucinatory, dreamlike scene after the other in a Cape Town that exists as a might-have-been. It is also a tale as unreliable as its narrator, who throughout the chapters is stalked by the idea of the predator rather than a flesh-and-blood lion that we can see and trap. And in the end it's the lion that exists as placeholder, a menacing, inescapable fate that awaits Con that he projects his fears and desires onto Sekhmet, the lion in the zoo where he works.This is also a story about identity – seen in how Con to a degree is a parasite who attempts to assume aspects of self that don't belong to him in an effort to establish an authentic identity. In the end, he is mired in the very illusions he seeks, settling for the facsimile than the real, that is forever outside of his grasp.I suspect also that this is the kind of story that is so laden with metaphor that you can pick it apart on every read-through and find further nuances. I need to go back and give this one another shot at some point. In the meantime, I remain in awe of Henrietta's writing.

. Written with clear gorgeous prose, the novel is set in Cape Town, but in a near future world where there is little contact with nature and the characters long for a connection with animals.The protagonist, Con, has drifted through life, and when he is asked by the mother of an old school friend, Mark, to collect his belongings after an accident at work, he steps into Mark's shoes and becomes the carer of a black maned lioness. Green Lion mourns humanity's drift away from nature, and presents a world in which our connection with it is merely symbolic, then asks us what it will mean for our souls when we can no longer access something greater than ourselves

As compelling, poetic and arresting as it is readible ! I couldn't put it down. In one narrative, charting civilisation's inevitable mix of human, feral, animal, tameable and the utterly untameable making their deals of compromise, sorrow, desire and danger, this is a starry novel from an exceptional South African talent. Recommended !

This is an intriguing tale of misfits. I wasn't quite taken in by the underlying narrative of the Green Lion, which adds a slightly mystical side to the tale, but nonetheless a refreshing change for fans of S African literature