Review: Archie Henderson
Tannie Maria and the Satanic Mechanic, by Sally Andrew (Umuzi)
Sally Andrew is annoying. How can someone have such fun when writing is so hard?
I’d heard about Tannie Maria (who hasn’t?) and half-heartedly planned to get round to reading one of the books but hadn’t. Then I picked up a copy of Pierre Steyn’s wonderful Weg! magazine. Pierre was once a most able (as many of them were and probably still are) reporter on Die Burger where he and Stephen Wrottesley of The Argus (when he wasn’t freelancing or working for the Cape Times) competed on the crime beat but were also friends.
Nasionale Pers (Media24 today) was good at identifying talent (before their boss Koos Bekker started killing off newspapers) and Pierre was soon shuffled off to the magazine section where he has flourished.
I digress, but bear with me. Pierre and the inimitable Toast Coetzee recently produced Weg! Karoo. Anything to do with the Karoo is irresistible. I’ve never lived there but love to visit. My mother was as Karoo as a donkey-cart and skaaptjops. Born in Murraysburg, she lived from Nossob (where her father was stationed to monitor the spread of the rinderpest) to Vanwyksvlei and Victoria West. She was the oldest of seven children, and the first of the three first daughters who always told us the Three Sisters were named for them. She married an Engelsman to escape the Karoo but kept wanting to go back.
Just establishing my Karoo credentials here.
In Pierre and Toast’s edition, those engaging Karoo chroniclers, Julienne du Toit and Chris Marais, run into Sally Andrew, in a ball gown, and her partner Bowen Boshier with his “chiselled features” at the Schreiner Writers Festival in a packed Victoria Manor in Cradock.
To cut short a long waffle, they visited Sally and Bowen two years later in their Moroccan-style, mudbrick house off the beaten track in a nature reserve near Ladismith where Andrew brings Tant Maria alive.
Tannie Maria should have been familiar. She turned out to be quite the opposite: I had never come across a tannie quite like her. Oh, there were some indications, food being one of them, but none with the variety of Tannie Maria’s emporium and recipes.
Tannie Maria is more than just murder mystery escapism: there are genuine recipes for a variety of dishes in her books, so it’s necessary to keep a few snacks on hand as you read.
Sally Andrew has fun with Tannie Maria and all her neuroses, which she deals with by imagining, then delivering on the recipes, especially for her new love, the local detective, Henk Kannemeyer. They are the strongest characters in the book. I didn’t care much for the others, but they are a convenient supporting cast.
Maria, with her chickens, and Henk ,with his hanslammetjie, keep the story moving in spite of a flimsy plot, which you can forgive because the descriptions of the Klein Karoo are so vivid. The gnarled trees and veld, with a backdrop of the Swartberge in its protective embrace. And the R62 to travel along along — surely the best road in South Africa — with fewer lorries, magnificently cambered passes like the Huisrivier (House River just doesn’t do it) over which Stanley de Witt and his father travelled with their cow in David Kramer’s song.
What’s not to like about a story with a setting like that? And with food to match, along with Tant Maria’s advice and homilies as the agony aunt for a local newspaper; she has a surprisingly deep empathy for her fellow beings.
Tannie Maria and that strange mechanic of the title (where else will you get a man who can fix your bakkie and provide therapy for trauma) was the first one of Andrew’s books I tried. It doesn’t matter where you start, Tannie Maria is a matter of taste and Sally Andrew’s Karoo crowd needs some acquiring. But it was a good starter.
Yes, the books are ‘flimsy’, but the main characters are a delight. What a great review!