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A Novel
by Nadia Davids
Book Reviewed by:From award-winning South African author Nadia Davids comes a gothic psychological thriller set in the 1920s, where a young maid finds herself entangled with the spirits of a decaying manor and the secrets of its enigmatic owner.
I come highly recommended to Mrs. Hattingh through sentences I tell her I cannot read.
The year is 1920, in a small, unnamed city in a colonial empire. Soraya Matas believes she has found the ideal job as a personal maid to the eccentric Mrs. Hattingh, whose beautiful, decaying home is not far from The Muslim Quarter where Soraya lives with her parents. As Soraya settles into her new role, she discovers that the house is alive with spirits.
While Mrs. Hattingh eagerly awaits her son's visit from London, she offers to help Soraya stay in touch with her fiancé Nour by writing him letters on her behalf. So begins a strange weekly meeting where Soraya dictates and Mrs. Hattingh writes—a ritual that binds the two women to one another and eventually threatens the sanity of both.
Cape Fever is a masterful blend of gothic themes, folk-tales, and psychological suspense, reminiscent of works by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Daphne du Maurier, and Soraya Matas is an unforgettable narrator, whose story of love and grief, is also a chilling exploration of class and the long reach of history.
ONE
23 Heron Place
The Cape
Southern Cross Colony
March 12, 1920
I come highly recommended to Mrs. Hattingh through sentences I tell her I cannot read. She conducts the interview in her kitchen, a large room on a street of houses grand and gabled that look out onto the dipped bowl of our harbor city. A row of homes, my father told me, for doctors and ambassadors. When she says the position is for a combined cleaner-cook, I realize she is not as wealthy as her house—its address and ornaments—suggests. I glance past the kitchen door to the corridor, and though the light is dim I notice rows of variously sized rectangles, solid blocks of deep maroon, shades darker than the rest of the wallpaper. Paintings must once have hung there. Perhaps she has had to sell them, and now the memory of each casts a precise and permanent shadow. It is likely she lost part of her fortune in the war. Well, who hasn't? Even those of us who had no fortune to begin with have felt the pinch and scrape ...
The novel's focus on the characters' heightened emotional states, combined with its gothic undercurrents and sense of prickly unease, gives it the atmosphere of a classic psychological thriller, even as the pacing remains more ruminative... The reading experience becomes less about solving the mystery that emerges and more about observing how its resolution will impact the fraught dynamic between Soraya and Mrs. Hattingh...continued
Full Review
(683 words)
(Reviewed by Callum McLaughlin).
Lucy Caldwell, author of These Days and Winner of the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
Cape Fever is a slim, taut, haunting novel – a gorgeously evocative portrait of a time and place whose reverberations continue to rock our world today. Indeed, the book slips effortlessly between worlds – taking in the mysteries of storytelling, the mysticism of Islam, the psychic intrusions that are symptomatic of the power dynamics between an avaricious employer and her reluctant servant – showing the temporal circumstances that can imprison us, and the ways we have of freeing ourselves. The writing is poised and assured, the characters complex, nuanced and so very real. It is an utterly beguiling read.
Fans of the gothic, horror, or supernatural genres will certainly be familiar with the image of an ethereal woman clad in white or gray. Captured in fleeting glances and shrouded in mystery, the so-called Gray Lady has become a mainstay of ghostly fiction, and examples of the figure can be found in folklore and real-life testimonies across different countries, languages, and cultures. There are reported repeated sightings of Gray Ladies in the Willard Public Library in Indiana; at Oxford University; in the Dark Hedges of Northern Ireland; at Fort St. Angelo in Malta; at Dudley Castle in the United Kingdom; and at Cumberland College in New Zealand.
The backstory of a Gray Lady ghost can vary, but it is almost always based in tragedy. ...
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