Red Dust: TV Tie-in (Paperback)

The descriptions of an African town were superb and it brought me back immediately to similar places that I visited.

Dirk Hendricks, a former policeman now imprisoned, had applied for amnesty in respect of his having severely tortured Alex Mpondo, now a member of Parliament. The powerful middle section of the novel is about the hearing of his case by the Commission. The tense confrontation between Hendricks and Mpondo in court is painful in the extreme. The burly Hendricks, who has been well-briefed by his lawyers and is in any case very familiar with court proceedings, who knows all about psychological weaknesses and is a shrewd actor to boot, is determined to conceal the full truth. Mpondo has for some years tried to bury the memories of what he has suffered, but now they surface and cripple him. Moreover, he is also crippled by something else (which I must not reveal in this review) which both he and Hendricks know but which Mpondo’s constituents do not. There is also the undercurrent that the two men are bound to each other by a terrible kind of intimacy.

Closely interwoven with the Hendricks-Mpondo relationship is that between Pieter Muller, another ex-policeman, and James Sizela, a black headmaster, desperate to find the remains of his son Stephen whom Muller had killed. While Mpondo and Sizela are very different characters, Hendricks and Muller are, from a fictional point of view, perhaps a little too much alike; and the key confrontation between Muller and Sizela, though it is as tense as that between Hendricks and Mpondo and as powerfully written, struck me as being rather closer to melodrama than to drama. And although the game of bluff and double bluff that is played at the end of the book can be seen as an ironic commentary on the word “truth” in the title of the Commission, it also subtly, but I think unintentionally, shifts the novel from a profound exploration of the psychology of torturer and victim to an altogether slicker level of story-telling. But despite these reservations, I found this book so gripping that I stick with a five star rating.
Lastly, a few words about Sarah Barcant, Mpondo’s lawyer. She had been born in Smitsrivier and had been trained there as a lawyer; but fourteen years ago, during the apartheid period, she had left for New York. One of the many excellent qualities of the book is her awareness of how much has changed in South Africa during her absence - and how much has not: in particular the eternal landscape of South Africa, its light and its scents, which are wonderfully conveyed. At the end the question is posed whether she had been a New York lawyer for so long that she never really understands what (in the author’s view, I think) the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was, and what it was not and could not be.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was set up in post-apartheid South Africa, enabled people who had been imprisoned for the crimes they had committed in apartheid times to secure an amnesty, provided they told the full truth about their activities to a court set up by the commission, presided over by judges and with perpetrators and victims represented by lawyers. This novel deals with one such case in a dusty little town called Smitsrivier.

Dirk Hendricks, a former policeman now imprisoned, had applied for amnesty in respect of his having severely tortured Alex Mpondo, now a member of Parliament. The powerful middle section of the novel is about the hearing of his case by the Commission. The tense confrontation between Hendricks and Mpondo in court is painful in the extreme. The burly Hendricks, who has been well-briefed by his lawyers and is in any case very familiar with court proceedings, who knows all about psychological weaknesses and is a shrewd actor to boot, is determined to conceal the full truth. Mpondo has for some years tried to bury the memories of what he has suffered, but now they surface and cripple him. Moreover, he is also crippled by something else (which I must not reveal in this review) which both he and Hendricks know but which Mpondo’s constituents do not. There is also the undercurrent that the two men are bound to each other by a terrible kind of intimacy.

Closely interwoven with the Hendricks-Mpondo relationship is that between Pieter Muller, another ex-policeman, and James Sizela, a black headmaster, desperate to find the remains of his son Stephen whom Muller had killed. While Mpondo and Sizela are very different characters, Hendricks and Muller are, from a fictional point of view, perhaps a little too much alike; and the key confrontation between Muller and Sizela, though it is as tense as that between Hendricks and Mpondo and as powerfully written, struck me as being rather closer to melodrama than to drama. And although the game of bluff and double bluff that is played at the end of the book can be seen as an ironic commentary on the word “truth” in the title of the Commission, it also subtly, but I think unintentionally, shifts the novel from a profound exploration of the psychology of torturer and victim to an altogether slicker level of story-telling. But despite these reservations, I found this book so gripping that I stick with a five star rating.
Lastly, a few words about Sarah Barcant, Mpondo’s lawyer. She had been born in Smitsrivier and had been trained there as a lawyer; but fourteen years ago, during the apartheid period, she had left for New York. One of the many excellent qualities of the book is her awareness of how much has changed in South Africa during her absence - and how much has not: in particular the eternal landscape of South Africa, its light and its scents, which are wonderfully conveyed. At the end the question is posed whether she had been a New York lawyer for so long that she never really understands what (in the author’s view, I think) the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was, and what it was not and could not be.