A case of commercial suicide? Barbara Adair’s second novel, End, uses the story of the 1942 movie Casablanca, but situates it in the Mozambique and Johannesburg of the late 80s, with odd references to Hector Pieterson, cell phones, Nigerians in Hillbrow and the Rosebank Hotel as a hangout for rightwing extremist where a black pianist plays Nkosi sikelel iAfrika.

“Will it have a wow finish?” asks the front cover. Well, it ends somewhere in Mozambique with Princess Di in a blue Versace dress being shot and killed.

And that’s not all for absurdities. There’s also the cruel writer Freddie, a kind of superimposed character, who talks to her protagonists, called X and Y, and treats them like puppets on a string. Oh, and one of them changes gender, whenever it suits the manipulative Freddie.

Still with us? Yep, that’s what they call metafiction, intertextuality and post-modernism in literary theory. But who would want to read a novel like that? Why would an established publisher such as Jacana Media want to publish it?

Hold on though: it’s not as off-putting as it seems. End is an exciting and very readable book with a lovely pulpy touch that comes complete with cocaine, violence and evocative sex scenes. It pokes fun at the heaviness and seriousness of literature and the literarati, and asks questions about ‘worthy’ things like engagement, authenticity and morality.

End is also about acting your part in a media driven world where Paris Hilton can become a celebrity by the virtue of surname and tits and South African literature seems obsessed with identity and race. Moreover, if you need further proof of its literary merits: End was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, just like Adair’s first book In Tangier we Killed the Blue Parrot made it to the final list for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award.

We meet at the Soulsa restaurant in Melville. If I wanted to be clever, I’d now copy a sentence or two from Casablanca to describe the scene, compare Soulsa to Rick’s Bar and make cinematic allusions to the drugs, violence and sex of Melville. And maybe I should also attribute some of Ingrid Bergman’s characteristics to Adair. Would that leave me as Humphrey Bogart?

But I won’t. It’s been decades since I’ve seen Casablanca and all I really can remember is the quote “Here’s looking at you kid” and the tearful goodbye at the airport. Definitely a wow finish.

That said, with her silver hair, smart black outfit, musky perfume and small physique 46-year old Adair does look as if she could have been auditioning for a movie-part. The part of the slightly jaded aristocrat with bohemian tendencies in a film that is set in her favourite era, between the wars, the interbellum, when things are in a state of collapse and people live as if there was no tomorrow. Think Paris at the turn of the 20^th century, Berlin in the 1930s and Joburg in the 80s.

“I’m not sure,” she says when asked why she’s so fond of that kind of social and moral disorder. “I like to explore the idea of war, the concept. So the interbellum is when it’s not happening, and when you can explore. I like the aftermath or the beforemath of war, because things are upside down and anything goes. Wars allow people to do a whole lot of things that they don’t normally do. Like kill people.”

Then she rolls a cigarette, using an ingenious little device. She lights it. The smoke momentarily touches her pale lipstick, then evaporates into the nippy evening air. “Does the smoke bother you?” she asks rhetorically.

Barbara Adair is not an easy person to interview. For one, she loves playing roles. With delight she recalls her appearance at the Alan Paton Award in Cape Town. “I dressed up. I even wore dark, dark, dark lipstick and this beautiful, beautiful, beautiful coat. So it was a jol. The image I wanted to project was: I’m on my own. Everyone else went with someone else. You know: ‘I’m gah-in with my partnah.’ Fuck that! I was going on my own. And I did. They were shocked and horrified. People said: ‘Come and talk to us.’ I was: ‘I wanna stand alone.’ Which I did for some time. Barry Ronge also came by himself. So we were a pair, quite fun.”

At the same time she’s extremely guarded, especially when it comes to her privacy. “I love the show, but I don’t want anyone in my house,” she summarizes her attitude.

Additionally she’s wont to use campy phrases like “jeeeez”, “wow”, “absoluuutely” and “well, there you goooo”, which smothers everything she says in irony, and makes it hard to see where she’s serious and where not. And as a lawyer – she teaches law at Wits – she’s very hard to pin down, preferring to answer with a counter-question or an ‘I don’t know’.

So when I ask her how the idea of End came about, she replies: “I don’t know. I must be honest.” Then, when pushed, she says she thinks she based the first chapter, which takes place in the Maputo train station, on a personal experience. “And suddenly I thought: wow, they got a station scene in Casablanca, so let’s use it.”

The story of Casablanca is essentially the choice between love and virtue, between staying with the woman you love and doing the right thing. Of course in the movie Rick (Humphrey Bogart) does the right thing. This was 1942 after all, and the World War II was well under way.

Adair went for the opposite. In her book there’s no morality or virtue. Using a writer as a superimposed character gave her the means to undermine all the clichés. The writer toys with his characters, often in a cruel way. Wanna fall in love? Forget it! Wanna be a hero? Go ahead, you’ll die and your name will end up on a T-shirt.

It’s fairly easy to read the book without having seen the movie. But it certainly works better if you have seen it and remember the noire-ish, moody setting. Adair certainly does. “I’ve watched the movie a hundred times, I know it backwards, all the songs, all the lines. A lot of the lines in the book come out of the movie and a lot of mise en scene as well. So, yes, I used the story and turned it on its head, because Casablanca is all about true love ladida, and he’s a hero, a war hero, fighting the Nazi’s. And in my book it’s: who is the hero? The drug dealer? Who is the hero? Make the clichés the opposite.”

Apart from deconstructing Casablanca, End is also a literary game and an attempt to link SA writing with the great canon of literature, to make it part of a continuum and to steer it away from the social and political messages that have been forced upon us since the 80s and never seem to have disappeared.

Adair’s work isn’t gritty realism, instead it challenges the reader. It has little to do with that fashionable word ‘relevance’, which, as poet Sean O’Brien recently pointed out in the Guardian, is “often brandished to mitigate ignorance and justify the failure of curiosity”. Adair’s work is experimental and demanding. It does away with rules and expectations. It rips, plunders and remoulds like the best underground hiphop. It snarls at political correctness, morality and the “wow finish”.

Very post-modern. “Absoluuutely,” she exults. “And no one does post-modern writing in South Africa, or very few people. They’re all into realism or magic realism, which is very African, sort of cliché African. Ben Okri that kind of thing. Which I like, but… I don’t do local. Everyone does local. Let’s get out of it, let’s do something different.”

But how different is she? In End she gleefully mentions Princess Di’s Versace dress, and she describes someone as having “a Calvin Klein body”, a reference to the androgynous CK-ads. But is that new or different? Bret Easton Ellis wrote several books using brand names and song titles to conjure up the artificial world we live in. She doesn’t care. “That’s the other point of the book: there’s really is nothing new. This whole thing about: ‘Hey, wow, I am creaaaaative, I’m an artiiiiist.’ It’s bullshit.”

Sales figures don’t move her. End is definitively less mainstream than Tangier, which at least had a proper plot and ‘normal’ characters, even though they were based on the American writers couple Paul and Jane Bowles. This lack of compromise and the love for free writing is something she inherited from her American writer heroes Kathy Acker and William Burroughs.

“I wish I could write like that,” she sighs. “I also like the fact that Burroughs and that whole Beat-set tried to subvert the norms of the time, whether it was through drugs or cutting pieces of pages to put novels together. I like their subversion. Acker does it in a different way. She doesn’t have stories. She’s more into feeling. I’m not into feelings.”

Like Acker and Burroughs, Adair wants to subvert, to shock the bourgeoisie. “I had the boring 9 to 5 person in mind when I wrote. Mr. Clean who goes shopping in the Hyperama with 2.5 kids. I want to say fuck you,” she says, suddenly sounding like a rebellious teenager.

Now Mr. and Mrs. Clean will most probably not choose End for their bookclub or bedside table. But if they would, they might find the sex in End a bit outré. It’s very graphic, has lots of texture and is mainly aural. “For me sex is not a great deal, it’s like eating, like having a fabulous meal. Wow, I had great sex!” says Adair. “Put it in that context. When you describe food you describe it graphically, the sauce, the taste of it. So why not do sex in the same way? I’m not sure why it’s all aural. It must be something from my childhood lurking there, haha. Maybe the food association is very pertinent. To eat.”

Much of the sex in End is between men. “I don’t find it hard to write that,” she asserts, and laughs. “I heard this queer boy had made a comment the other day. He said: ‘Wow, how can she describe men like that, I don’t even have such good sex.’” She shrugs. “I don’t know, sex is sex.”

Barbara Adair only started writing eight years ago, because “one day I decided I wanted to write.” She did some research, heard about the workshops by the late Lionel Abrahams, and joined. “I remember him saying: ‘You can’t write so pretentiously, you have to turn it down a little bit.” I used long words, big sentences and concepts. He said: ‘Don’t pretend that you’re so clever.’”

Tangier was conceived during her time with Abrahams. And ever since she’s been sitting behind her laptop, pounding away, loving every minute of it. Writing to her comes naturally, it’s not a struggle. She prefers to work in her second house in the bush, between Hoedspruit en Phalaborwa, where she works mainly in the morning, one-and-a-half hour of ‘automatic writing’, not paying attention to spelling, grammar and punctuation. Then she sits down for coffee and cigarette, and edits. The bush is like her elixir. “I like the solitariness, the loneliness, the isolation, nature. I love being on my own. After two months I want to go back, be in the movies and restaurants and all that, but I like solitary life.”

Adair adores the idea of being an enigma. The interplay of her lawyer’s instinct, a slight aloofness and her fondness for experimental literature goes some way in explaining her oddball status in the South African literary scene. But there’s something else. Five years ago she was involved in a car crash in the Free State, in which five people died and she was the only survivor, relatively intact. A near death experience that she coped with without the help of therapy or counselling.

She doesn’t want to dwell on it too much, except to say that it did change her life. “In the sense that we all know we’re gonna die at some point. And that suddenly became very real, so you might as well do everything you wanna do while you can.”

Her friends noticed a change in attitude. “They said: you’ve always been talking about wanting to do one, two, three, four and five – and now you’re actually doing it. Before I was working like a dog, earning a fuckload of money, doing all these consultancy jobs. Then, after the accident, I decided: I don’t wanna do that anymore. It was a very existential moment. I gave up all the work and gave up a whole lot of other things. I focused more on writing because I enjoy it. I focused more on travelling because I like it.”

And she cleverly steers the conversation away from the horror, mentioning her trip to Tangier, one time home of William Burroughs, Gertrude Stein and Paul Bowles, as a highlight; as if a film set had come alive. “I went to the hotel where they used to hang out, the bars, the cafés. Yes, the myth perpetuated in my head and then in a book.”

When I raise my hand to switch off the tape recorder she says: “But you haven’t asked me about heroes and heroines.”

I tell her that this is not an interview for The Weekender. But what the hell, give us your hero. “Well, I like Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992). She has such a nice voice and is also that kind of androgynous person. And it’s the era, the stage, the personality, the dressing up, the performance. I listen to her music, read about her, love her movies. Der Blaue Engel (1930)! She’s so beautiful.”

That’s it?

“That’s it.”

Not exactly a ‘wow finish’, I say.

She grins.

(Originally published in the June 2008 issue of Empire)