EASY PEASY by Lesley Glaister (Bloomsbury)
Easy Peasy takes its title from a children’s chant, but taunts in this narrative move from the playful to the spiteful and eventually to outright cruelty. The victim is a 10-year-old deaf boy, Vassily.
The action alternates between the past of childhood and the present when the adult Griselda has to confront the suicide of her father and the secrets he kept from his family.
The childhood recollections are beautifully realised, especially the world of the girls’ tree-house and the colony of wood ants that Griselda (later Zelda) nurtures there. The later sections, however, are far less compelling. Written mainly in the present tense – often an irritating device – the story of Zelda’s conflicts and rather boring lesbian affair never really convinces.
What redeems these sections is the mystery surrounding Zelda’s father. He is an elusive but intriguing figure whose relationships are much more interesting than Zelda’s with the unfaithful and solipsistic Foxy.
THE SLAVE BOOK by Rayda Jacobs (Kwela)
After 27 years away from her home country, Rayda Jacobs returned to South Africa in 1995 and published her first novel, Eyes of the Sky, in 1996. In her second novel, The Slave Book, she turns her attention to the history of the Cape and the iniquities of slavery.
Without labouring or sensationalising the subject, Jacobs dramatises some of the horrors inherent in the system of buying and selling human beings: loss of identity, cruelty, separation from loved ones, humiliations of every kind and dehumanisation of owner and owned alike. Interconnected with this is the chronicle of Sangora, a Muslim slave, who escapes to the Muizenberg mountains, and the love story of his stepdaughter, Somiela, which transcends both cultural and racial barriers.
BUXTON SPICE by Oonya Kempadoo (Donker)
Born in England of Guyanese parents, Oonya Kempadoo returns to her roots for her debut novel. Guyana of the Seventies – particularly the village where the protagonist grows up – is a place of contradictions: violent and corrupt on the one hand, innocent and vibrant with possibilities on the other.
Lula is from a mixed family (Indian, black and white) and recounts her own episodic tale in vivid language, part patois and filled with colloquial compounds and arresting imagery (the children fold up with laughter “like we had hinges everywhere”; rollerskating downhill they are “tall sailing mantises”).
Brooding over the action – the family bickering, the adolescent preoccupation with sex, the enmities, scandals and reconciliations – is the enormous Buxton Spice mango tree, ever-wakeful witness which “knew everything and wouldn’t tell [Lula] nuthing”.
LIVE BODIES by Maurice Gee (Faber & Faber)
One of New Zealand’s most respected novelists, Maurice Gee’s latest work examines the life of a retired businessman, Josef Mandl. A Jew, Mandl escaped from Vienna in the 1930s only to be interned on Somes Island as an enemy alien.
The irony of this and the adversities endured in the camp make for compelling reading, especially against the – mainly implicit – backdrop of the Holocaust. Though he goes on to make a successful life after the war, Mandl emits an ineradicable sense of loss and alienation.
DIVINE SECRETS OF THE YA-YA SISTERHOOD by Rebecca Wells (Pan)
Now available in paperback, this comic novel centres on Siddalee Walker, a stage director who gets disowned by her mother. The Ya-Ya Sisterhood – a group of friends from Vivi’s childhood with its own version of feminism, as well as arcane rituals and a scrapbook of “Divine Secrets” – swings into action to repair the relationship.