Rumours Of Rain [Kindle Edition]

Rumours of rain is the story of Martin Mynhardt a successful, hard-nosed, Afrikaner mine owner and businessman who is using the opportunity of spare time in London to write about a pivotal weekend in his life. Mynhardt is unfaithful, manipulative, and untruthful. His story reveals in extraordinary depth the relationships he has with family and friends and how his rigid adherence to self-interest destroys both those relationships and is destroying himself.

In a way Mynhardt's story can be seen as a metaphor for South Africa itself, the fierce Afrikaner protection of white rule and the implications for all South Africans and their relationship with the world.

Written entirely from Mynhardt's point of view, the numerous attempts by his best friend, Bernard, lover, Bea, and son Louis to give him insight into himself are all doomed to fail. We are left wondering what they all saw in Mynhardt that made him worth persevering with and yet in the process we are given the most wonderful understanding of them all.

This is an outstanding novel. Superb characterisation with an elegant multi-faceted plot set against a fascinating political backdrop. It is a spell-binding account of white South Africa. There are few writers who are as extraordinarily gifted as André Brink. This is as close to genius as it is possible to come.

Amid all the negative stories regarding Afrikaans and Afrikaners in the past 30 years...i hope the world will remember the positive things too, away from the sporting field and Christian Baarnard, literature has given us two afrikaans giants in JM Coetzee and Andre Brink.

Brink,a few years older than Coetzee has been writing for nearly 40 years and this one of his earlier novels is a tremendous work of angst,fear and honesty amid the stormclouds of mid 1970's South Africa. The narrator is no idealistic anti-apartheid campaigner, he is a true Afrikaner, he has made money had some fun. However,from a cold London hotel room he recalls the past decades, the incidents and the bad times that have befallen him and he starts to question who he is and what his country means to him.

This is no story of damascene conversions, Mynhardt suffers a little doubt but it his friends and his family who are his consience, he reacts to their doubts not his. Locations veer from the Eastern Cape in winter, to the crowded streets of Johannesburg. The narrative flits backwards and fowards with a hint of danger at every turn. War on the borders,internal strikes, the afrikaner flight from farms in the Eastern Cape, this isnt a smug narration of satisfied calm.

If you have any interest in South Africa this is well worth a read,in some sections as characters predict a fall of the white regime, you forget this was written in 1978, when the Apartheid regime had another 12 years left to run.

This book is definitely worth reading. It brilliantly creates tension and has that can't put down feel. The protagonist is looking back on his life and you are waiting for him to reach a climax of some sort , a revelation. He is a very unpleasant character and you are led to expect that the something that has happened will create a turning about within him; within his vision of himself; that he will become self aware. But it doesn't happen. The conclusion he reaches is that everything is justified which preserves himself. Other characters in the book are less well rounded and the relationships don't quite make sense and are therefore not quite believable. Why would the other characters maintain their faith in him, their love of him, in the face of his monstrous selfishness and betrayal?