Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Even Angels..., 18 Aug 2005
Karoo Boy is an ambitious novel, in the sense that it tackles the really big themes that even angels (and definitely first-time novelists) approach with cautious tread: living in apartheid South Africa, growing up to consciousness, love and the loss of it, guilt and death. And yet Troy Blacklaws manages to tame these wild things, and bring them to rest in a compact novel, with a handful of well-drawn characters, surrounded by the vast impersonal canvas of the Karoo. He is sensitive to the minutiae that make up a life, and he describes these in spare prose that paradoxically becomes lyrical in the repetition of the rhymes: "I paddle out through the ice-tea surf. The rising sun glints in the empty windows of the weekend train to Cape Town. I stand on a borrowed board. No flicks or tricks. The wave barrels. For a moment, I glide. Then the wave tumbles me. I fight it instead of going with it. Have I forgotten everything? I even forgot to dogleash the board to my foot. As I surface I hear the crack of the board on the rock. I wade up out of the water, feeling ashamed." Karoo Boy is not only a welcome addition to the body of fiction now written by thirty-something South Africans, relating their experiences as teenagers during the unholy hey-day of apartheid. It is also a bloody good story, and it is well told.
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9 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Youth lost, 9 Oct 2005
Karoo Boy is a book about growing up - a Bildungsroman that recalls Salinger's Catcher in the Rye with its sinewy language and the imaginative force of its images. Douglas's twin brother is killed in a freak accident in a beach cricket game, a striking image of the shattered social fabric and the brooding violence that lurked beneath the surface in the South Africa of the seventies. His father hops it. Douglas is banished with his mother, their servant Hope and the dog Chaka to the boondocks, far from Cape Town, on the edge of a South African nowhere. The book relates how he slowly comes to terms with his exile and the double loss of his father and his twin brother. Karoo Boy seems almost to glow in the harsh light of the South African veld as the author unwinds the vivid images of a world at the edges of civilisation. The tempo of each chapter is measured, and moves from chord to chord with the precision of a twelve-bar blues. The music of the seventies plays in the background of the book: Neil Young, the Doors, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan. And the writers who form the canon of good literature in white, private schools make up Douglas' education - Paton, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Golding. The world of the growing boy - from the menacing biology lessons, to the pain of a cane on his hand, the sun on his skin, the smells and sounds of the desert, a boy's growing awareness of his own sexuality and his effect on others - are deftly drawn into a complex picture of growing up in this alien environment. Karoo Boy is full of tactile images that light up the prose like a match flare in the dark of night. One of Douglas' first tasks at the new house is to pull a dead jackal out of a rain tub and the reader can feel the huge effort that goes into overcoming the revulsion against the stink of the corpse and having to drag it out of the tub and bury it in the yard. The revulsion takes us back to the death of his brother and insinuates the slumbering threat of violence in the town. In a primitive humiliation ritual of the poofie from the big city, the local rugby-playing jocks at school spike Douglas' peanutbutter sandwich with a dead lizard and then strip him and bundle him into a wicker basket. Douglas emerges, naked, with dogpee dripping form his hair, the personification of the waspy town dweller. But there are also new friends to be made. He meets a Xhosa, a rangy outsider in the outback and they become friends over the rusty body of an old Volvo that makes a striking metaphor for the crumbling Apartheid system. Douglas's girl friend, Marika, comes from a Boer family and her father, obsessed by some ritual of racial purity and ready to kill for the honour of his clan, gives her a thrashing for going with a kaffir and a Cape Town moffie. Another novel with the theme of growing up in an alien environment is Youth by J.M. Coetzee, who describes the London exile of a student from South Africa. The hero is a lonely intellectual who gets involved with women with experience, who reads Rilke and Brecht, Pound and Eliot and longs from afar for the embraces of the beautiful girls in London. But it makes rather dull reading. Coetzee cannot awaken sympathy or liking for his rather dreary hero and if it's meant to be a deadpan version of Decline and Fall the humour is very well hidden. How does Blacklaw's book compare with Coetzee's? Coetzee gives us plenty to brood about - damp summers and disgusting breakfasts, a yearning for affection perennially frustrated by the anxieties of the neurotic girls who cross his path. It's all in the mind with Coetzee, the search for intellectual enlightenment, losing the fight against the earthy marshes of desire. Blacklaws' book is austerely written, with never a wasted word or a jarring image. Blacklaws creates the wide dusty world of the Karoo in a few chosen words and takes us with him on the journey to manhood in the arid wastes of Sharpvilled South Africa. Karoo Boy is a sensitive portrait of a boy struggling to come to terms with a hostile environment, mourning lost male relatives, watching with caution the roughies in the town and discovering the delights of a female body when he goes swimming with Marika. It is a lyrical book, full of striking images that recreate the dusty world of a teenager, full of potential dangers. Blacklaws creates a microcosm of the realities of South Africa in the stifling atmosphere of the seventies and shows us what it was like to be a white exile in a disintegrating environment. Life and death, love and hate are the themes of this fine book - universal statements about the way that South Africans treated each other in days when Nelson Mandela was just another prisoner on Robben Island.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Even angels, 26 Sep 2005
Karoo Boy is an ambitious novel, in the sense that it tackles the really big themes that even angels (and definitely first-time novelists) approach with cautious tread: living in apartheid South Africa, growing up to consciousness, love and the loss of it, guilt and death. And yet Troy Blacklaws manages to tame these wild things, and bring them to rest in a compact novel, with a handful of well-drawn characters, surrounded by the vast impersonal canvas of the Karoo. He is sensitive to the minutiae that make up a life, and he describes these in spare prose that paradoxically becomes lyrical in the repetition of the rhymes: "I paddle out through the ice-tea surf. The rising sun glints in the empty windows of the weekend train to Cape Town. I stand on a borrowed board. No flicks or tricks. The wave barrels. For a moment, I glide. Then the wave tumbles me. I fight it instead of going with it. Have I forgotten everything? I even forgot to dogleash the board to my foot. As I surface I hear the crack of the board on the rock. I wade up out of the water, feeling ashamed." Karoo Boy is not only a welcome addition to the body of fiction now written by thirty-something South Africans, relating their experiences as teenagers during the unholy hey-day of apartheid. It is also a bloody good story, and it is well told.
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