COVID-19 AND THE desperate urgency of its rules and some of the seemingly illogical government measures to contain it seem like ancient history in 2024, but just look at any news site today and you will remember that the apocalypse is always nigh, which gives David Robbins’s Covid-centric 2021 novel, Kite Flying at World’s End, a prescient and haunting sense of the universal. Set during the worst of the pandemic, but looking back at plagues and terrors that have rocked the world since the times of the biblical Flood, Boccaccio’s predictions and the bubonic threat, it’s a fabulous tale of love and death, of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the ability to articulate what you believe, in paint.

Coloured with the inimitable style, quirky and potent sense of visuality and the rich handling of syntax that has enabled Robbins’s travel- and history books to sing with a relevance and readability, this fictional tale is a circle turning in his prolific and potent career. He hasn’t written fiction for some 30 years, but this new work fits his oeuvre engagingly and with wisdom.

And it is here where we meet Gregory Davis. He’s a professional artist. A thinker, a doer, a sometime drinker of whisky. He’s also a man with his heart in the right place. Hard lockdown rules make for shifts in the dynamics of being in the world and of social discourse and Gregory gets to meet his neighbour Maria April over her freshly laundered sheets, drying in the wind.

It’s a tender love story which skirts cliché and examines the complexities of race and children and bias in a world that is universally threatened by its collective imminent demise. But more than a tale of a predictable relationship, it is about how an artwork grows under the vagaries of time, thought and incident that keep its inner narrative fresh and cooking, even if it is illogical or has a will of its own. If you make things in any way that requires your senses and your intellect; something that grows while you are not always in its presence, and something that troubles your heart while you develop it, you will understand the nuances of this work and be inspired by it.

Kite Flying is a beautiful and lucid read, which is edited to be tight and brief in its splaying out of the whole universe rolled into a few weeks. It’s one which makes you want to hold back on the speed of your eyes running through the text, but you don’t, because the plot is filled with crevices you could not anticipate and you become attached to the characters from the get-go, with their levity and candour. It leaves you with your heart holding on to the things that matter and a respect for the immutability of how things must turn out.

• Kite Flying at World’s End by David Robbins is published by Porcupine Press, Gauteng (2021).