Seven Steps to Heaven Book Review

Book:  Seven Steps to Heaven

Author: Fred Khumalo

Publisher:  Jacana Media

The first page determines a book’s fate.  It can lead to its sudden death or long life as the reader navigates its waters.  Professors at Columbia University School of Journalism drummed into students that the lead paragraph must grab the reader.

It is all subjective and it is one of the reasons why I didn’t buy Seven Steps to Heaven from any of the Exclusive Books that carried it when it was published in 2007.  The first page is too identical to life I prefer to avoid. That is why I do not tolerate it in literary material.  I also never considered being a nurse and do not watch horror films.

Bitches’ Brew, Khumalo’s previous novel, also published by Jacana Media was the second reason why I didn’t buy Seven Steps.  Life again.  Should novels mimick life?  I was mad at Bitches’ Brew.  How can it be a photocopy of what happens in real life?
I’m the loser in this debate because that is what makes a great writer: expose our vanity about thinking that everything is about us, including a few paragraphs in a work of fiction. 

·         You’re so vain

·         You probably think

·         The song is about you

Who wrote the song?  I can’t remember but the lyrics are ever green.  Vanity, the destructive human condition.
Synopsis
Familiarity.  Fred Khumalo’s books are popular in his South Africa because they are a mirror of small and big places folks call home, soccer heroes like Jomo Sono and Kaizer Montaung, local music, journalists who kept the flame alive before writers like Sizwe, love for parents and religion.  However, a synopsis of some kind for the reader born somewhere else, is in order.

Durban. Johannesburg. Lesotho, the country in a fetal position, completely surrounded by South Africa. Two families as different as night and day. Their sons Sizwe, whose name means nation and Thulani, which means people should keep quiet, grow up to be one man.  Yes. One man. There’s a bar, South Africans call a shebeen, where love is lost or found. 
Missing 

Many people seem to be missing in Seven Steps to Heaven.  Sizwe, a writer, is on the first page because his friend Thulani is missing.  South Africa is also infected with a virus. The world calls it a revolution.

Africans call it something else as they live in fear of their teenage sons, neighbours and co-workers, who can report them for questioning the political status quo.  Journalists have nightmares because they see things and cannot write about them because they don’t want to go missing. ‘Words are a sword. Cut the abyss open,’ P 41.

Thulani’s father, a pastor, goes missing, but it has nothing to do with politics, although it is to the reader.  Thulani’s mother and the whole community is worried sick because he is an unorthodox pastor.  He loves soccer, women and enjoys a cold beer like his flock.

Readers who do not subscribe to this ‘pastor of the people’ ways, die a second death when they learn that it was a personal sabbatical, not missing due to circumstances beyond his control. Men of God.  At what point do they stop being men and become holy? 

This is precisely one of the admirable things about Seven Steps to Heaven because it is a question seldom found in novels.  Who is the man behind ecclesiastical purple robes or white collar turned backwards?  It is a pertinent question in South Africa because the church was a sanctuary for black people during white rule called apartheid.
  
‘Political organisations were at each other’s throats, their members killing each other.  People who had worshipped under the same roof now held divergent political allegiances.  Instead of bumping into each other on Church premises where they were likely to kill each other, they decided to stay away from the churches.’ P.29. 
But perhaps the most important question in the book is why Sizwe is missing.  He tells himself that he is a drunk because he doesn’t understand why his friend Thulani abandoned his parents and disappeared into thin air.  However, events in the book indicate that Thulani is not missing at all.  He is just living his choice however unconventional it is.

Clearly, Sizwe is the one who is mentally missing, otherwise he would not have invented Vusi Mntungwa, a writer.  He should have understood the contents of the box he collected from Thulani’s mother, instead.

‘By the way, your friend left a boxful of books and notebooks here.  He wrote me a letter the other day to say you must come and collect them and do whatever you please with them.’ P. 118.

Volume

The theatre of operations determines the quantity and weight of words authors use.  Aristocratic writers in England wrote poems like Daffodils: ‘I wondered as lonely as a cloud.’ It was easy for them to wander about because they lived in the country surrounded by trees and servants and had a lot to time on their hands to look at flowers.

If the language in Seven Steps to Heaven is not flowery, it is because the two-rooms and four rooms the government gave black people had no space for gardens.  Apartheid made sure they were born, raised and buried in tight spaces, therefore there is a backlog of stories that can only be told with facts and figures the author provided in Seven Steps. The language becomes minimalist when he announces impending doom and death.

Words are lethal.  Words are dangerous.  They betray us to the world in which we move.  Once you open your mouth to utter a word, you’ve bared your soul to the world.’ P. 202.
It is even worse for writers because their words are recorded for posterity.  Seven Steps to Heaven presents the reader with a dilemma, who is more credible of the two characters, Sizwe Dube or Vusi Mntungwa?

Give me Vusi anytime.

By: Nonqaba waka Msimang.