Set in South Africa, the new novel from the author of The Breaking is both a family drama and deeply political.
Irma Gold’s second novel explores the vital things we share through art and human connection. Arlie is a 30-something Melbourne photographer with a talent for getting inside his subjects. Despite this, he’s stuck in a rut, deflated and filled with self-loathing after a series of failed romances and the belief his career isn’t one his parents value.
He was tired of always having to explain how it worked, and they never understood anyway, not really. What it was like trying to make it – whatever that meant – as an artist. How hard it was. He was certain his parents thought him a failure, or at the very best a mediocre talent. Perhaps they even thought he was deluded, trying to pursue this thing called art. But he had no choice. Sometimes he hated his craft, hated the hold it had over him. The way it pulled and pushed him. Sometimes he wished he could be happy doing something straightforward – a builder, a public servant, an electrician. Anything solid. Anything he could clock off from. You never clocked off from art. It was always there, demanding something of you.
The sale of one of Arlie’s works to a major gallery funds a trip to South Africa, where he begins work on a series of photographs for a new exhibition.
He finds himself in Kliptown, a suburb of Soweto where the historic Freedom Charter was signed in 1955. Kliptown remains a slum and its residents continue to struggle with poverty, unemployment and crime in post-apartheid South Africa. Meanwhile, across the railway tracks, the swanky Hotel Soweto rises out of the ‘concrete wasteland’, gleaming like an unfulfilled promise to those left behind. As a white outsider, Arlie’s path through the township is smoothed by the charming choirmaster, Rufaro, who sees the potential for the Australian photographer’s work to shine a spotlight on his community, saying:
He is going to expose what the government is doing here. That they have forgotten us. The pressure must come from the outside, because our government does not listen to us.
Arlie has been drawn to South Africa because his mother, Dellie, had grown up there. To his frustration, she only shares ‘tidbits’ of her past. Her agoraphobia hints at trauma, but she refuses to discuss anything beyond the blandest of recollections of the country she grew up in. Arlie’s camera is how he gets to ‘see inside people’ but his own mother’s history remains ‘a blank space’. Gold skilfully sets the scene throughout her narrative for his mother’s eventual poignant revelation.
Irma Gold writes about South Africa with such vivid detail that it comes alive. She capably directs the reader’s focus from sweeping, atmospheric renderings of landscape and place to zoom in on the smallest of details. Kliptown’s poverty and the despair fuelling its drug use and violence is delicately balanced against the beauty and exuberance of the people Arlie photographs. Yet Soweto remains misunderstood by the rest of the world. When Arlie’s occasionally dour and difficult father arrives for a visit, he’s on high alert, convinced of danger at every turn. His prejudice, and fear for his personal safety, close him off to the joy of the place that Arlie so desperately wants to share. Father and son take to the open road, setting out on safari to experience the South Africa of the tourist brochures. But their relationship – and their own individual prejudices – are dramatically tested.
Gold’s South Africa is a place of beauty and optimism, but also of dark and bitter resentment, where violence and tragedy can explode to the surface. Shift encapsulates both heartbreak and hope. It’s a deeply political novel, but it’s also an engrossing family drama and a story of the redemptive value of making art.
Irma Gold Shift Midnight Sun 2025 PB 272pp $34.99
Naomi Manuell is a Melbourne writer. She recently won the Melbourne Athenaeum Library Award for best ‘body in the library’ story at the 2024 Sisters in Crime Scarlett Stiletto Awards.
You can buy Shift from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.
You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.
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Tags: art, Australian fiction, Australian writers, families, Irma | Gold, photography, politics, South Africa, Soweto
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