Long before tourism came to it the Garden Route was beautiful and home to many. This charming novel interweaves three stories over two centuries with the point of intersection a cave in the dunes near the mouth of the Keurbooms River.
The main story concerns Dan Butler, an archaeology and history student. He abandons his studies to join the South African Infantry in World War I and spends three years in the trenches. This experience leaves an indelible impression on this young man. When he returns to South Africa he is probably suffering from post-traumatic shock syndrome, but in those days this condition was not well understood. He takes a holiday up the East Coast and offers his services as ferryman on the pontoon over the Keurbooms River. In his troubled state he sometimes sees it as the River Styx. Perhaps this was not the best job for a young soldier recently come from the killing frenzy of a big war.
The weakest section of the book deals with Vicky, the granddaughter of Dan, who is also on holiday to the area. Readers should persevere with these sections of the book — sadly rather stodgy.
The third story is that of a young Khoi man, Hanibal, who flees with his cousin from a brutal white farmer in the Langkloof. Making his way to the coast along the Keurbooms River, he comes to a cave in the dunes at the mouth of the river.
Both Hanibal and Dan are afflicted by debilitating survivor guilt, movingly evoked. Using the sinking of the South African ship the Mendi during the war and a detailed examination of conditions on the battlefields, as well as incidents in the lives of Hanibal and Vicky, Algar examines the effects of violence on individuals, both victims and perpetrators. At times it is a little too didactic, but Algar’s purpose is to look at issues of forgiveness and atonement and though his book is a tad longwinded it is a thoughtful novel that brings together strands of our social matrix and carries it in a good story.
Bones to Ashes
by Kathy Reichs
(Random House)
Kelly Fletcher
Kathy Reichs tells a good story. There are layers to her books that make for interesting parallel reads. In Bones to Ashes the storyline swings between identifying a really old skeleton, locating a childhood friend who disappeared under mysterious circumstances, finding and identifying a number of young girls who have gone missing and, on a more personal level, protagonist Dr Temperance Brennan’s relationships with detective Andrew Ryan and her sister, Harry. Naturally the stories end up intertwined and neatly concluded — well almost.
A forensic anthropologist, Reichs delves deeply into the science behind the mystery of limnology (the study of lakes and other bodies of fresh water) and diatoms (single-cell algae with cell walls of silica). The science is necessary, but in the first half of the novel it is extremely detailed and there is a lot of it. But the pace picks up in the second half and makes it worth the effort.
Reichs’s novels straddle the divide between forensic thriller and murder mystery: the pace is not quite fast enough for a thriller, the forensic details too many for a mystery. She doesn’t shy away from the gory details that are the norm for those who work with human remains and this could deter sensitive readers, but her flair for a good story more than makes up for the scientific detours and body-boiling details.