Tom Solemn – A Biography: The Anatomy of a Death

The wording on the cover of the book lays bare the novel’s predicament from the onset. The title, you will notice, identifies the book as a biography. Yet, look down, and you’ll realise that the book is a novel, and by Matthias Stockenström.

How then do we find our way into our ‘untold’ stories in a shattered, shattering world, where familiar tropes, echoing a thousand-fold across the earth, no longer hold true?

Another question: Is the age we live in indeed ‘post-truth’; or is it that we determinedly shy away from pushing beyond our worn-out fabrications?

Stockenström hazards a diagnosis.

You won’t like what he finds.

Still, perhaps we can allow song and dance to converge in such a way as to animate new ways of telling stories, stories, for instance, of a man grieving for a lost son, a monk struggling to believe in God, an abandoned boy finding solace in a monastery, a group of itinerant women quarrying rock, an old man drawing a cart, and a man living alone on a farm, animals – a crow, a horse, a lamb, a pig and a donkey – his only companions. Who, then, is Tom Solemn? And does it matter? . . . When you’re up against eternity, you don’t stand a chance.

This way, it seems, Matthias Stockenström begins to trace what might also be described as an artistic manifesto.

You know his work has just begun.

The question, I suppose, is will you trust him sufficiently to let him guide you down.