South

Novel · 200 pages · Paperback · 2023 · Dundurn Press (Rare Machines)

The safer account

A freelance writer known only as B travels south to report on labour unrest at an offshore oil rig. He is finishing a manuscript about his father, a factory worker and union organiser who disappeared when B was a child. Babak Lakghomi runs both projects through the same procedure: each is stripped of its political cause and returned with a private one attached. In South, the damage stays on the page. Only its explanation changes hands.

Replacement is the state's preferred form of erasure. The Publisher allows the father's book into print after removing his union history. A bad marriage and possible homosexuality now explain the disappearance. On the rig, the burnt worker is assigned mental illness and smuggled drugs as the cause. The state detaches visible injury from collective action and returns it to the public as private failure.

Lakghomi's direct prose records the worker's burning without interpreting it, then shifts attention to the cleaning crew and production resuming. Workers return as numbers on hard hats, with new men occupying the places of those who witnessed the fire. Only after this record settles does the diagnosis enter. Fact appears first; cause is assigned by someone aligned with the Company.

The father's notebook surfaces in detention with several pages already removed before it reaches him. Written records cannot keep custody of their contents. A classified file places a lawyer's affair beside the chemical-poisoning claim he pursued for fifty-seven dead workers. Private material stays available as leverage. Political history loses the form in which it might support testimony.

Writing under capture reaches its clearest form in a sentence the narrator is ordered to copy: "I am a coward and conspirator like my father." The interrogator supplies the wording; the narrator supplies the handwriting. Its first-person grammar makes state judgement resemble self-knowledge. No discovery is required; captors need the narrator's "I" attached to their conclusion, since a confession can circulate as authorship even when every word has been imposed.

Wind gives bodily damage a second language. The village ritual is repeated with the narrator moved from the edge of the circle to beneath the shroud. That changed position matters more than whether possession is real. Medical authority dismisses his weakening limbs, and the prison ship describes captivity as care. The ritual's response is physical and communal. It cannot establish cause, yet it recognises a body official language has reduced to illness.

The narrator remains compromised by his drinking and betrayal of his wife, Tara. A photograph of the encounter gives the captors leverage, just as the lawyer's affair is recorded beside the case involving poisoned workers. Private failure is real. It cannot explain political detention or dead workers. Both truths stay on the page without one cancelling the other.

Lakghomi's plain sentences keep interpretation behind physical fact. The Assistant Cook disappears between scenes, his removal reaching the narrator through unfamiliar workers in the kitchen and a stranger in his bunk. No scene of arrest fills the gap. Long waiting is broken by violence without preparation. The reader receives consequence at the same moment as the narrator, with cause managed elsewhere.

Recovery cannot reverse control of the record. Tara helps him relearn ordinary movement. Their intimacy does not return, and she leaves. His account exists only as a private file hidden in the toilet tank. The altered book has already earned a royalty cheque. Public authorship belongs to that version; the account of detention remains hidden.

South offers no inner life and no release. A sceptic may call its lack of inner life coldness and dismiss the ritual as a mystical hedge. The wind chapters remain unverifiable, yet their uncertainty follows the method governing the notebook and confession: every account reaches B after someone else has handled it. The austerity is the price of the argument, and the book pays it in full. The method never breaks, from the first cut to the last page.

Demonstrations have been beaten down and the corner shop has reopened. The Publisher's new offer arrives inside that restored order. Winter covers the dried grass. Walking with a frame, the narrator follows footprints through the snow.