The second novel by South African author Nadia Davids, winner of the 2024 Caine prize, is set in a “small unnamed city in a colonial empire”, shortly after the end of the first world war. We might imagine it as a version of Cape Town – birthplace of the author, and of JM Coetzee, whose endorsement appears on the back cover.
Soraya, a 19-year-old woman from the Muslim quarter, is sent by her mother to work as a maid in a wealthy part of town. Her new employer, the elderly Mrs Hattingh, is a settler who fondly recalls her days “when I was a girl in England”. When the novel opens, in 1920, Mrs Hattingh lives alone: her husband is dead, and her son, Timothy, fortunate to have survived the war, lives far away in London.
The house, Mrs Hattingh proudly says, is one of “the Cape’s good homes”. Soraya is given an instructional tour through its many rooms: “Pantry, dining room, sitting room, guest room, gun room”; “You will dust daily”. Soraya may be the daughter of a washerwoman, but her father is a religious calligrapher “with the hands of a scholar”. While she’s careful to limit her replies to her employer to a subservient “Yes, madam”, it’s largely her interior narrative – fiercely intelligent and wildly alive – that transports us through this slim, tense novel.
Though the house is outwardly grand, Soraya notes signs of decay: Mrs Hattingh, she realises, must have lost some of her fortune during the war. Now, in addition to Soraya’s other tasks – already rapidly expanding beyond housework to include gardening and live-in companionship – she “will be expected to collude in her deceits”: to help Mrs Hattingh hide the facts of her reduced circumstances from her neighbours.
But Soraya has already enacted a deceit of her own: she arrived at Mrs Hattingh’s house with a letter of recommendation from a former employer which she claimed not to be able to read. In fact, Soraya can read. She withholds this from Mrs Hattingh, she says, as some employers “prize education in their servants, others resent it”. It’s less trouble, in other words, to keep it quiet. But it later becomes clear that this omission is based on her mother’s firm instructions: “Always keep something back. There is no need for them to know what you are truly thinking.” Not so casual a deceit after all, then: rather, a strategic attempt to assert agency.
And despite being from different worlds, the two women emerge as worthy opponents in the silent power struggle that forms the central conflict of the novel. Each feels certain of her superiority over the other. Each is trapped by the house, and haunted by its ghosts. Each secretly despises the other, and longs to be reunited with her own family – Soraya with her parents, siblings, and fiance, Nour; and Mrs Hattingh with her beloved son, Timothy. It is on Master Timothy’s impending visit home that the engine of the story initially turns, as the women busy themselves with preparations. But Soraya’s deceit carries terrible consequences, and as the pressure builds, so does her anger. She begins to have visions of “this house all aflame”, her employer’s “whole body a burning log”.
We’re clearly meant to root for Soraya as narrator, but it’s worth pointing out that Davids’s treatment of Mrs Hattingh is one of the novel’s great strengths. She’s depicted, initially, as unbearably patronising (“I always hire your people if I can help it, Soraya”). Later, there’s a subtle shift, showing the Englishwoman as so lonely and deluded that it felt almost uncomfortable to have her held up as a figure of ridicule. It’s a mark of Davids’s skill, her empathetic range, that she finds space for human understanding of this difficult character, for ordinary sympathy, before the end. Cape Fever is a cleverly told and ultimately satisfying novel, by an author bold enough to reveal uncomfortable truths.
• Cape Fever by Nadia Davids is published by Scribner (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
