Rating: 5/5
Review:
Excellent
I thought this an excellent book. It is exceptionally well written, with an absorbing story and real moral and intellectual content. Set apparently in the far future in a world in which civilisations have been drowned and history almost completely lost, the story is of a man banished from the small society he ruled and effectively created and who now lives alone on a small, slowly vanishing island. It is very hard to say more without spoiling the story too much, but something occurs so that he eventually decides he must return, whatever the consequences for him.
The real point of the book is an exploration of how we deal with terrible events of the past - whether they can really be forgotten and even airbrushed from history, whether people need to face the truth of what they and others have done and whether they are capable of doing so. There is, too, a moving but unsentimental and wholly believable portrait of a man who felt it his duty to his people to commit dreadful acts for their sake, and how that sacrifice of his humanity has affected him. I thought both these aspects of the book were quite remarkable and exceptionally well done, especially in a first novel by a relatively young author. It is significant, I think, that he is South African and so from a nation where such things are a powerful and recent, but all countries have such things in their past and there is much that is relevant to all of us in this book.
The prose is excellent. Narrated in the first person by an ex-soldier it is clear and unsentimental with an unaffected elegance and spareness which I found completely gripping. The whole book is absorbing and very rewarding and I recommend it very warmly as a thoughtful, intelligent and haunting read.
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