The Woman Next Door

By Yewande Omotoso

(Fourth Estate, £12.99)

OCCASIONALLY, fellow readers tell me they dislike a novel because they disapprove of the main characters. Often these characters have upset some moral barometer in the reader’s mind. I usually reply: but what are they like as characters? Nevertheless – and satirists aside – it does take a certain skill in a writer to create a disagreeable protagonist and an enjoyable read. In Yewande Omotoso’s debut novel The Woman Next Door, she puts two pugnacious octogenarians at the centre of a neighbourly feud. Neither woman is particularly endearing, and the is plot strung together haphazardly, yet the novel displays a wit, charm and playful energy that reduces these problems to insignificance.

Hortensia James and Marion Agostino live on the wealthy and mostly white Katterijn Estate in South Africa. There are striking similarities between the two. Both women have had successful careers at a time when women were not meant to move beyond the kitchen sink; Hortensia was a designer and Marion an architect. Both their husbands have turned out to be dull disappointments, and the women are embittered about it. They both look resolutely forward to death. Finally, they both hate one another, an animosity that stems from jealousy, prejudice and the grievances left over from apartheid.

The prejudice is racial. Hortensia is a black woman. Worse, she’s a successful black woman. She has to force herself into the Katterijn community meetings, hosted by Marion and full of the white aged. Regardless of their small-mindedness, she keeps going back: "to mock them, to point out to them that they were hypocrites. To keep herself occupied." She has an admirable weathered stubbornness. Her hate, justified as it is in some cases, spreads seemingly to everyone. When her husband dies, she stands at the edge of the grave: "even though she could feel the tears gathering in the corners of her eyes, when a wiry man began shovelling the sand, there was also a part of Hortensia that wanted to tell him to stand back so she could spit."

Omotoso writes with a sophisticated flippancy. When Hortensia meets Marion’s granddaughter, her response is typically underhand: “lovely little girl … if not that she calls you 'grandmother' I would never have imagined a familial connection.” It’s an interesting scenario. A cruel woman throws a cruel remark in the direction of another cruel woman. Marion has a superior, holier-than-thou attitude to all and sundry. Her hatred and belittling of Hortensia extends beyond her neighbour’s skin colour. It is built on the fact that she designed Hortensia’s home, hoping to live in it one day. Through a series of unfortunate circumstances she ends up next door.

In the first half of The Woman Next Door, chance happenings and events are flung at the reader like a volley of gunfire. Marion finds out she is bankrupt. Hortensia’s husband dies and leaves in his will news of an addition to the family. All the while the community are alerted to a legal process from the land rights commission, meaning that a white-owned home acquired under apartheid is being claimed by a black family. Hortensia is told her garden is a burial site for former slaves, and a family want to bury their relatives there. She then decides to renovate her home. During the process a crane injures both women and takes the front clean off Marion’s house.

There is, bewilderingly, more. But Omotoso slides in the political themes skilfully, rather than letting them blare out of a loudspeaker. And in the second half of the novel, the plot calms down. The two women are allowed space to develop an unfriendly friendship. The dialogue between them flourishes. Their banter is reflective of their respective pasts, which are sad and lonely, and told in lucid detail. The novel develops into an insightful and fascinating diptych of two women, with the history of colonialism and slavery lurking in the background.

By the end of The Woman Next Door, you understand how cruelty and hate can breed within a person. Omotoso achieves this without recourse to sentimentality. The two women do develop some sympathy and humanity, but it is tempered. In one of their final conversations they come to a mutual approximation of each other. “So it’s hell for the both of us,” says Hortensia, with a mixture of sadness and comedy. For this reader at least, it is reassuring to know the pair retain the quarrelsome and inimical aspects of themselves that make them such entertaining characters.