Andrew Brown in Street Blues – a reluctant policeman
The Book Lounge is fabulous! The crowd was spilling out into the street last night when I arrived for the launch of Street Blues (Zebra Press), the latest release by award-winning novelist Andrew Brown.
The entrance to the Book Lounge looked like a crime scene, barred off with yellow tape with uniformed police officers much in evidence. Fortunately they turned out to be invited guests.Street Blues is an account of Brown’s years as a reservist with the Mowbray police and a festive crowd turned up to mark the occasion in this most congenial of venues. I spotted numerous well-known names on the Cape Town literary scene; Margie Orford; Lauren Beukes; Joanne Hichens; Sarah Lotz; Rob Turrell; Zapiro, looking very sporty in an orange shirt; and as always, Ben Williams circulating with his camera, ready to tell the world about local writing on www.bookslive.co.za.
The sound system in the Book Lounge is excellent and the speeches carried easily to guests on both floors. Margie Orford handled the introduction with her usual aplomb and was a fitting choice as the first person to read Street Blues; she and Brown share a common background as student activists during the eighties. Brown describes his memoir as a simple personal narrative but Orford was quick to point out that it goes far deeper than that, describing the impossible paradox of policing in South Africa with the compassion and decency so evident in his award-winning novel, Coldsleep Lullaby.
The qualities I was most aware of during Brown’s speech were sincerity and commitment. I noticed several people amongst the audience nodding in recollection as he spoke about his introduction to Mowbray police station on a day when it was barricaded with khaki sandbags after an attack by PAGAD. He was clearly moved as he told the story of his own role in a cadre which targeted the same police station during his activist days. I had a strong sense of how far we have come as a country, seeing the rapport that clearly exists between Brown and those same police officers today. Street Blues covers daily police-work ranging from hijacking to petty theft, traffic collision and fire-fighting as well as exposure to the darker, more violent aspects of a stressed country. It focuses on the complexities, camaraderie and courage which characterise police life, a career which seldom gets the accolades it deserves in the fight against crime in South Africa. Maybe Street Blues will help to correct this.
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