Once again, Deon Meyer creates a vivid and sometimes frightening look at life in contemporary South Africa, which serves as the background for a real can’t-put-it-downer of a thriller. In the course of his six previous novels, each of which has been more exciting than the previous one, he has continued to expand his plotting and characters. This is his most complex and intricate novel yet, filled with twists and ironies and a series of surprises in the conclusion that makes it all work. Unlike most of his previous novels, however, this one is divided into four separate sections, each of which develops independently from the others, like individual novellas, with little to connect them until late in the novel. What the reader knows from the outset is that South Africa’s Presidential Intelligence Agency (PIA) has uncovered a plot which suggests that militant Muslims are planning a takeover of the country with the aid of violent gangs and disaffected youth from the poorest neighborhoods of Capetown. Since the PIA itself is threatened with the prospect of its absorption into a national super-intelligence agency, they are sometimes overly zealous in promoting their own interests.
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Author Philip Hensher is nothing if not controversial, and a quick look at the ratings for his novels on Amazon in the UK will show the typical love-him-or-hate-him distribution of star ratings for his books. Though Hensher was named in 2003 as one of Granta’s Twenty Best British Novelists, and his previous novel, The Northern Clemency (2008) was nominated for the Man Booker Prize, many readers have never forgiven him for what may be one of the most infamously nasty book reviews ever written. Having never read a Hensher novel before, and having heard little about him, living as I do “across the pond,” I approached this novel with some sense of uncertainty, hoping that the brilliance of the author’s own work would nullify the opprobrium directed toward him by his resentful critics. I need not have worried. This book, though not without its excesses, is a significant and utterly compelling work of social criticism, a classic example of the best of the best of social satire. The disappearance of a young child on an errand shocks the community of Hanmouth, where the “elite” have never before had to deal with the expansion of the town limits to include people not “their kind,” with their unexpected problems like this one, and many resent the time and effort the town has expended to find China, a “council child.” Great dialogue, vivid description, well developed characterizations, and brilliant satire.
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When she died in July, 2010, Beryl Bainbridge, Dame Commander of the British Empire, had been working for the preceding six months on this novel, The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress. Nearly completed at the time of her death, this novel is her twentieth, including five which were nominated for the Booker Prize and two (Injury Time in 1977 and Every Man for Himself in 1996) which won Whitbread Awards. Set in late May and early June, 1968, the novel opens with Harold Grasse, known as Washington Harold, greeting Rose, whom he regards as “Wheeler’s woman,” at the airport in Baltimore. Rose has come to the United States to try to reconnect with a “Dr. Wheeler,” who played an important role in helping her to deal with her miserable childhood, and he has paid for her trip. The mysterious Dr. Wheeler is working on the campaign of Robert F. Kennedy for President, and he is traveling the country, so Harold Grasse is in charge of trying to get them together. Unbeknownst to Rose or some of the other characters, all of whom also seem to know Wheeler, Harold also has his own reasons for wanting to find Wheeler and to exact his revenge for Wheeler’s atrocious behavior. A wonderful finale to Bainbridge’s great writing career.
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Released to coincide with the fourteenth anniversary of Princess Diana’s death on August 31, 2011, this newly translated novel by Laurence Cosse will attract many of the readers who enjoyed her best-selling A NOVEL BOOKSTORE, from 2010. In this novel, originally written in 2003, the author picks up one of the remaining mysteries from the investigation of Princess Diana’s death and creates a novel around it—a witness’s report of a slow-moving car which the Princess’s speeding Mercedes grazed at the entrance to the Alma tunnel where the fatal crash occurred. Sometimes described as a white Fiat Uno, the car has never been found, and the driver has never been identified. Readers of this novel will learn that the driver, as the author imagines her, was Louise Origan, a young woman living, not quite happily, with her boyfriend Yvon, on her way home from work at a restaurant in Paris. Panicked when the Mercedes crashes, Lou never stops, and on reaching the safety of her home, she relives her actions: “I never thought of stopping, not one second. I was running away. It was my foot that decided, or fear, in any case something that isn’t like me.” It is not until the next morning that she learns who the victims of the crash are, and though she may have contemplated going to the police to admit involvement in what she thought at first was an “ordinary” accident, she realizes that “there was no way she could go to the police now.”
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Many thanks to Tarek Shahin for granting an interview about his book RISE (reviewed below), a collection of satiric cartoons from the Daily News Egypt from April, 2008 – April 2010, in the lead-up to the Egyptian Revolution. I hope this interview will shed some light on what it is like to be a cartoonist during the tensions near the end of the Mubarak regime and how one finds humor in serious topics:
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