Sharon Dell spoke to author Marguerite Poland about her latest book Iron Love

Breaking the silence and denial

It is impossible to resist the charm of KwaZulu-Natal-based author Marguerite Poland. From the start, she exudes warmth, grace and sincerity — much like her latest novel Iron Love. This coincidence of art and persona is perhaps unsurprising, considering her real-life blood ties to her heroic protagonist, Charlie Fraser, Poland’s “beautiful and poignant” grandfather’s first cousin who forms the focal point of a sentimental, amusing and moving (almost biographical) account of the experiences of a group of boys in an un-named Eastern Cape school (based on St Andrews) prior to the outbreak of World War I. In that sense, it’s a biography.

Poland is marvellously candid about the impetus behind the novel: “I fell in love with Charles Fraser,” she confesses. “He moved me.” Indeed, Iron Love, as she goes on to explain, is a book which takes love as its central theme — “manly” love in particular. It strikes me as an interesting conundrum. The book is written with a sensitivity and subtlety which is distinctly feminine and yet at the same time manages to capture very convincingly the “silence and denial” ethos of the period which forbade expressions of emotion. It speaks of a manly love, but this is not a love unique to men, as Poland explains. Rather, it is like a social code of stoicism and reserve, practised and respected just as much by women as it is by men. Mothers, for example, are a significant, if largely silent, presence in the novel, the recipients and readers of homesick, badly spelt and selfishly boyish letters, the longed-for representative of home and hearth; the familiar and secure. Poland tells me that in real life Charlie’s mother never spoke about him after his death during combat. The silence is customary of an era. The only outward manifestation of her ongoing (iron) love for him was her daily habit of polishing his plaque.

I suggest that her approach to the issues of hierarchy, conformism, corporal punishment, war and colonialism are not overtly critical; that there lurks a nostalgia which seems to lend a degree of merit to some of the practices and traditions of her boys’ school. Poland comes close to bristling, but rises magnanimously above it. Boys’ schools, with their rigid regard for authority and ritual, are easy targets, particularly for critics with a disposition towards caricature. Poland has pointedly steered clear of this approach in favour of a more even-handed view, not just of the school system with its contentious policy of corporal punishment, but of its role in the nurturing of new rulers of the British Empire. “I have tried to explore the middle ground, examining the complexity of a system which offers much that is good and yet has the potential, and in fact does at times cross over into unjustifiable and destructive authoritarianism.” What Poland attempts in Iron Love is an exploration of the ebb and flow of school life for the majority of scholars for whom the boarding school experience constitutes an important source of identity-creation and fulfills a universal need to belong. Furthermore, the voice of Percy Gilbert, Second-Head-of-House, and referred to as “the oracle” weaves the narrative together, providing an intelligent, and slightly cynical, critique of the school environment.

Poland is wholeheartedly committed to the accurate depiction of the school system during a period which coincides with the height of the British Empire. It is hard to fault her on this score. She has very clearly done her homework. She’s studied KZN academic Rob Morrell’s Phd thesis on the subject of hierarchy in KwaZulu-Natal schools at the turn of the century. “This piece of research was crucial to my understanding of the ethos of the time — a sort of ‘muscular christianity’ — whereby desire was channelled into war and sport and discord of any form crushed,” says Poland. The author has also fastidiously read all school magazines produced by St Andrews, has taught in the school, has opened her heart and mind to the experiences of boys both within St Andrews and at other schools. Her refined understanding of the experiences of these boys has borne fruit in the form of rewarding feedback she has received from male readers from various parts of the world who testify to her capacity to unlock the memories and emotions of that experience.

A disciplined adherence to accuracy is also cited as a defence to my next question, another which Poland has clearly anticipated. Why is Iron Love silent on the race issue? Where are the black people? I raise this because of the overt political overtones of Poland’s last novel Shades, a novel which, while also intensely personal, touches on many of the themes of apartheid, racism and nascent oppression. Shades is very firmly rooted in a South African political context and deals closely with the lives of the country’s black inhabitants. The world of the boys’ school in Iron Love, on the other hand, represents, with a few brief exceptions, a whites-only enclave. In this, Poland points out, it is an accurate depiction of reality. Is race an issue in the minds of young boys? Probably not. While many of the boys themselves converse in Xhosa and have deep-seated ties to black people back home, the reality of colonialism means that there is no space, discursive or otherwise, for these black associates in an all-white boys school, solidly crafted along British lines and so much a part of the broader colonial machinery. In a nutshell, and as incongruous as it seems to a modern audience, it’s inconceivable.

Iron Love is a touching novel, offering a highly sensitive examination of the futility of war and the enormous psychological burden it places on the men and boys required to put themselves forward for combat and for whom the catharsis of emotional expression is denied. In Charlie Fraser, Poland has created a repository for the story of the sacrificial lamb. A beautiful, near perfect specimen of a boy on the brink of manhood. He’s almost too good to be true. Poland is aware of this, and his tragic death has an inevitability about it. It is a loss which carries with it the seeds of an indictment of a world possibly ill-prepared for the expectations of a life so bright.

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