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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In this challenging and important philosophical novel, South African author Ingrid Winterbach explores the particulars of one woman’s life to provide insight into the universal, as, of course, do many other good authors, but she goes way beyond the one or two significant new insights one has grown to expect. Here, her main character, Helen Verbloem, a writer and lexicographer of the Afrikaans language, wants to understand the very essence of life itself, what it means to be alive (if life can be said to have “meaning” at all, rather than simply existing as a fact), and how the Big Bang began a chain of events which has led ultimately to sentient human beings, often imperfect, such as Helen herself. She wants to know how man developed a consciousness and a conscience, and how—and even if—individuals, such as herself, have any unique place in the grand scheme of life. Why am I here, she wonders, and does my life matter? The resulting novel is astonishing—so grand in concept, so challenging, as the author leads the reader step-by-step through many discussions of the evolutionary cycle, and so exhilarating in its bold creativity, that I found myself constantly amazed at the unique ways in which the author employs all this information to create a whole new understanding of Helen, even as Helen herself is evolving with new understandings of her world.
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An unusually strong war novel which ranks with the very best, To Hell with Cronje by Ingrid Winterbach shows characters whose lives have been permanently changed by the Second Boer War (1899 – 1902), and raises the question of whether any of them—men, women, and children–will ever be able return to a peaceful life after the brutality which has created a new “normal” within their nation. How, she asks, can one cope with the horrors of war on any level? What resources can men develop that might allow them to survive personally? Four Boer soldiers who have served in a variety of fortified camps (laagers), with an assortment of career officers–mostly incompetent, in their opinion–have set out on a mission to return young Abraham Fourche to his mother in Ladybrand. Not quite twenty, Abraham has witnessed the horrifying death of his brother during the devastating Battle of Droogleegte, and he is now shell-shocked, mute, and unresponsive. (On my Favorites List for 2010)
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In his best and most complex novel yet, Afrikaans-writer Deon Meyer recreates a mere thirteen hours of life in Cape Town, South Africa, hour by terrifying hour, and those thirteen hours reveal more about the city’s many criminal cultures than you may want to know. The police are only partially effective. Following scandals which plagued the police department and resulted in corruption convictions for some key officers, the National Commissioner has established a new police force, the South African Police Service (SAPS), retaining their best and most experienced officers within new departments, the duties of which are not always clear. Meyer involves his reader in the action from the opening pages, in which a young girl, still in her teens, is tearing through the city, begging for help from people she sees, as she tries to escape five or six young men who are pursuing her. And she’s the lucky one. Her companion, who was also trying to escape, was not so fast. She lies dead, her throat slit and her backpack stolen.
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Winner of major literary awards throughout France, where author Caryl Ferey lives, Zulu is a powerful novel set in South Africa in the early 1990s when the country was in its transition between the rule of apartheid, governed by white Boers, and the rule of Africans, under the leadership of Nelson Mandela, newly released from prison. The transition is not exactly smooth, and the transfer of power is not automatic. The ANC (African National Congress, under Mandela) needs the former white rulers to maintain control in many areas—and, presumably, to preserve the peace–and these whites quickly establish their own militias to protect themselves and to act on “infractions” or threats to the “peace” as they see it. To the surprise of many, the defeat of apartheid inspires other African movements, like Inkatha, also to challenge the ANC, leading to civil conflict for power within the black movements. Ordinary black citizens become unsure where their loyalties really lie, and as violence grows, not only between the conflicting black movements but also among the conservative Boers and the black community, no one can be really sure where the violence afflicting the cities really originates.
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