South - Babak Lakghomi
The narrator of South, B, is a freelance journalist, planning to write an article about life on an oil rig in the South of an unnamed country. His intentions for choosing to write about this subject aren't entirely clear, especially as there are more immediate concerns and problems in the world. A drought, brought about by a climate crisis seems to have had a major impact on the country, particularly in the South. Arriving at a fishing village before being transported to the rig, strange rites take place that ominously foreshadow what lies ahead for B. on the rig.
More than just a journalistic assignment, B.'s intentions seem to be as much about finding a place to pull himself together and deal with issues that clearly preoccupy him. He has an alcohol problem, but doesn't seem to be able to cope the enforced isolation on the oil rig, cut off for security reasons from the world outside, with no access to a phone or laptop. He is having relationship problems with his wife Tara and disagreements with his Publisher over a book he is writing about his father, a prominent union man who disappeared when he was young child. The relationship with his father in particular seems to be the source of some of his longstanding problems ("Maybe if I'd had him around, things would've been different"), but they also appear to be making his life with the authorities difficult now as well.
In terms of plot, there isn't much more to go on here in South, at least in terms of background detail. The situation in the outside world is left vague, the true nature of narrator's personal problems and subsequent troubles he encounters as he tries to write a report about life on the rig are not covered in any detail. What you have are a number of fragmentary episodes that seem to feed his unease mixed with guilt. This nonetheless does succeed in generating a mood that is certainly Kafkaesque in tone, the problems as much a symptom of the main character's dysfunction, troubles and confusion as it is with the authoritarian nature of the world around him - although there is evidently a sense that one feeds into the other.
It's not difficult to detect a political undercurrent in the growing suspicion that B., as a journalist with a trade unionist father who 'disappeared', may have been manoeuvred into a disappearance himself, left on a rig, cut off from contact with the rest of the world. He fears that his report notebook and activities onboard are all being monitored and that he is even being blackmailed. Or is it all just paranoia exacerbated by taking sleeping pills? Either way, it's having a serious impact on his mental and physical health.
South manages then to be political and personal but at the same time abstract and universal, relating to the individual in conflict with the system without even intending to set out on that path, finding himself caught up in the paranoid nightmare of an authoritarian regime. It also reflects to some extent the nature of being a writer and an observer with a need to record and report lived experiences and the experience of being human. There is a sense of powerlessness about B., caught up in his own personal concerns while others are out fighting for freedom, yet he still manages to become an enemy of the state, the writer always a danger to authority, capable of putting unapproved ideas in people's heads. If anything is achieved against the totalitarian state, the outcome, for B., for the people of the South, is at best temporary, an accommodation, but essentially unresolved.
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