Pat Tucker reviews Hopetown by Ian Campbell-Gillies (Reach Publishers)
Self-publishing is a risky business at best and Hopetown is a good example of why. There is no doubt that Ian Campbell-Gillies has some writing talent; occasionally his prose is luminous and evocative. But mostly it isn’t — it’s brutal and crude and downright unpleasant. Perhaps a good publisher and a good editor, not the one who is named (and shamed, I would suggest) on the imprint page, might have redeemed it from the worst of its excesses.
To begin with, such an editor might have picked up the numerous and inexcusable errors in the spelling of well-known names, which any high school pupil with internet access could have checked in seconds, names such as “Kasirils”, “Carrolus”, “Graaf Reinet”, “Maitjiesfontein”, “jeripego”, to cite only a tiny sample. The sheer lack of interest in getting it right is positively insulting. Add to that the innumerable grammatical infelicities and this becomes a seriously unlovely book.
All of which might be overlooked if it weren’t so offensive in so many other ways. In this story of a man in search of his post-apartheid self, Campbell-Gillies’s self-indulgent stream of consciousness picks up all that is worst about the “new South Africa” and sweeps it along in a torrent of violent, racist loathing that leaves only destruction and despair in its wake.
Until, that is, the stream reaches his “Hopetown”, where, in the heart of the Little Karoo, we wash up on a bank of peace and — well — hope and our hero finds love and caring and people with real feelings and real lives. Subtle allegory, that.
The question is, is it worth the journey? My feeling is, not really.
Jane Rosenthal reviews Blood on the Path: A Saga of the Founding of South Africa 100 Years Ago by Harvey Tyson (Springbok Press)
At times this entertaining and interesting novel is as lurid as its title suggests — but who can deny that blood has been shed. It covers a great deal of mostly forgotten historical detail, spanning the 50 years from 1880 to 1930. The fictional thread is woven into the historical ground, rather than vice versa, and sometimes seems a little contrived, but if it encourages people to read and enjoy broadening their understanding, then this can only be a “good thing”.
This novel is full of colour and drama. It is dedicated to that esteemed historian (and expert on JX Merriman), Phyllis Lewsen, and Tyson acknowledges the considerable contribution made by the late Guy Willoughby, who “refined the historical accuracy of this tale by applying an admirable mix of erudition, talent and editorial brutality”.
This is excerpted from Willoughby’s foreword:
“No: the past is just an ideological battle-ground for those quarrelling in the present, like other spheres of public life these days. As our rainbow-nation myth fades, giving way to an uglier bickering reality, so the notion of a shared past has frayed too. Harvey Tyson puts our history where it should be — front and centre of our consciousness, front and centre of the idea of a shared South African reality.
“Unless we recognise where we come from, in all its squalor as well as its glory, it will be harder and harder to imagine ourselves to be one people. It is Harvey’s gift to make that imaginative effort worthwhile, by locating its origins in the tangled events of the days before yesterday.”
Barbara Ludman reviews The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano (Doubleday)
The Solitude of Prime Numbers has won Giordano, a particle physicist, Italy’s prestigious Premio Strega award, and no wonder.
Beautifully written, the book follows its protagonists, Alice Della Rocca and Mattia Balossino, each devastated by a childhood tragedy and isolated in their misery, to their discovery that each is not the only damaged soul in creation and to their attempts to reach out to one another.
Alice is the daughter of an overachieving father who forces her to learn to ski; it is on the slopes that her humiliating, life-changing accident happens. Mattia’s parents make him responsible for the welfare and happiness of his deeply retarded twin sister and, when she disappears, he closes off the rest of the world, seeking sense and solace in mathematics.
They meet as teenagers, manage friendship, and are making halting, painfully difficult progress towards a deeper relationship when Mattia wins a mathematics posting that will take him away from Alice and, perhaps, from redemption for both of them.
Using the metaphor of the prime number — divisible only by one or by itself — as the title of the novel was the suggestion of Giordano’s editor. It was based on Mattia’s view of primes (“suspicious and solitary”) and the rare twin primes, “pairs of prime numbers that are close to one another, almost neighbours, but between them there is always an even number that prevents them from really touching.
“You encounter increasingly isolated primes, lost in that silent, measured space made only of numbers, and you become aware of the distressing sense that the pairs encountered up until that point were an accidental fact, that their true fate is to remain alone.”