Book Review: The Dream House by Craig Higginson

Patricia is packing up her home on a Kwa-Zulu Natal farm, in order to move to Durban, South Africa. Feeling as old as the dark stone walls which surround her in the musty farmhouse, Patricia looks forward to quiet days overlooking the sea.

Accompanying her on the move are her husband, Richard, as well as her helping hands, Beauty and Bheki.

While she loses the use of her body, through pain sharply ascending her spine, Richard loses use of his mind, in what appears to be a form of senility.

All around her, the farm is slowly falling away to make room for a new housing development, with everything – including Patricia’s plans – in a state of half-being. Half ruin and half new, the farm becomes unrecognisable.

On the eve of the move, Patricia is visited by someone from her past, and her already murky recollections are forcefully aired in a new, harsh light, leading Patricia to realise that ignorance is not always blissful.

Painfully, as though foreign, she starts to realise that the world cannot be viewed solely through a single perspective, and that one is not the master of one’s universe, but simply a resident in a joint experience.

However, The Dream House deals with more than the passing of time and life’s inevitable flow towards the future, and stands firmly in the pull of the past. A beautifully poetic narrative that is filled with sad imagery; gloomy mists creep from the pages into the reader’s mind, seemingly to prepare for a dark ending.

Yet Higginson is not as predictable as this; subtly playing with the notion of white guilt, Higginson creates the sense of the reader being a voyeur – the use of Zulu in stretches emphasises the reader’s ignorance of another language, another culture, leaving them feeling alienated and other.

The flow of words in The Dream House is poetic; the language is melancholic and fluid, and reads as though it were an oral story, reflecting the subject matter in every sense, and reminding the reader that every story has a background, and that every action, however small, may have enormous consequences in the unforgiveable flow of time.

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