Guest review by C J Driver: HEAVY LIGHT by Horatio Clare

"Often funny, always clever, never dogmatic, often original and always brave."

C.J. Driver, always known as Jonty, was born in Cape Town in 1939. He was President of the anti-apartheid National Union of South African Students in 1963-4, and during that time was detained in solitary confinement by the security police. His first two novels were banned in South Africa and, even after becoming a British citizen, he was refused permission to visit his home country until after the end of apartheid. Driver has published five novels, two biographies, two memoirs and twelve collections or booklets of poems. He was a teacher for many years, in Africa, Hong Kong, India and England, latterly a headmaster. He lives with his wife in East Sussex, England. His new poetry collection, Still Further, New Poems 2000-2020, is published by Uhlanga Press. It is on sale in the UK from the African Books Collective. More on his website.

I declare an interest: Horatio’s father, John, was a close friend. He was News Editor of the student newspaper at the University of Cape Town, VARSITY, when I was its editor. I’ve written about him and others in an essay, “Used to be Great Friends” (Granta, 2002). We stayed in touch over the years and latterly, both living in the UK, became close again. So I knew Horatio a little over the years and learned direct from his father some of the troubles recounted in this remarkable memoir. It is a considerable grief that John Clare died before this book was published; he was very proud of his son’s achievements as a writer.

Growing up in South Africa, we had learned to think that what we called dagga (cannabis, hashish, marijuana, skunk, pot or just weed) was a drug which provoked those who ingested it first into violence and then, in due course, to the sort of mental deterioration associated with the effects of long-term alcoholism. The association of “hashish” with “assassins” was well-known. I remember the astonishment I felt when I came to England and was told “pot” promoted peace. Not in my experience, it didn’t.

When I was a headmaster – in Hong Kong, then back in the UK - I took a very hard line against the drug (and others) and would never once have used the term ”recreational” to underestimate its danger: it was illegal and a real and ready threat to mental health. No one ever claimed it improved A level results. I don’t suppose those who smoked an occasional joint or two were in that much danger; but the evidence of Horatio’s experience is that cannabis-psychosis is a hideous possibility. The first part of the book was (I found) easier to read than the parts dealing with drug-therapy and the advantages of talk-therapy. In part, I guess, this is because Horatio’s mania was simply so crazy (though not a-typical): he is a cog in an international conspiracy, watched constantly by hidden cameras, listened to by microphones hidden in walls and so on. There are moments when Horatio himself is funny about what he reckoned he was experiencing.

Mania slides in madness and he becomes a danger to his family and friends – and to himself. Finally, when things get impossibly bad, Horatio’s long-suffering and much-loved wife is forced to arrange for him to be “sectioned” i.e. locked up in a psychiatric hospital for his own and his family’s protection.

Horatio is not complimentary about the way the NHS treated him once he was confined in hospital and, after his release, needed private counselling. A technique called “EMDR” (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing), successful in enabling him to recreate traumatic parts of his past, is essentially part of talk-therapy: Open Dialogue. He had pretended to his wife and father that he was taking the medication prescribed by the NHS psychiatrists but everything he had read about the drugs and their longer term effects worried him. In the end, the talk-therapy seems to have worked without the side-effects prescribed medication might have had.

There is more than one reason for admiring this book: it is often funny, always clever, never dogmatic, often original and always brave. It isn’t a journey at all, really, more an exploration, though in a way the conclusion – that he has been healed, not cured – is a discovery, if not a destination.

Heavy Light is published by Chatto and Windus.

See also: Growing Pains: Making Sense of Childhood, a Psychiatrist's Story  reviewed by Nicola Davies

Fingers in the Sparkle Jar by Chris Packham, reviewed by Linda Newbery