Review: Vivien Horler

In the Kill Zone – surviving as a private military contractor in Iraq, by Neil Reynolds (Delta Publishers/ Jonathan Ball)

Neil Reynolds describes himself as “a military man through and through”. In 1980 he was called up for national service and after basic training was posted to what was known as the “operational area” in Namibia.

He says after his first contact he “was hooked”, and by the end of that year Reynolds had joined Permanent Force, and was serving in the reconnaissance wing of 31 Battalion at Omega in the Caprivi Strip.

After eight years in Caprivi he was transferred back to South Africa. In 1999, five years after the first democratic elections, he took an early retirement package.

He then became one of hundreds of highly trained and skilled soldiers for whom South Africa no longer had any use. And so, like many of his ilk, he opted for private security work. Two years later he was providing security for a diamond mining company in Angola, a job that entailed working on an isolated mine miles from anywhere for six months at a time, allowed a single five-minute phone call home once a week. There was no internet. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

A Long Way from Home, by Peter Carey (faber & faber)

In the 1950s Australia held a series of punishing motor rallies known as the Redex Reliability Trials which saw teams driving production cars around the continent on the roughest of outback roads.

In the 1955 event there was huge publicity as Australians followed the excitement of the more than 200 teams covering nearly 17 000 km in 18 days. More than half the field failed to finish.

Twice Man Booker Prize winner Peter Carey has used this rally as the framework for a marvellous novel of love and derring do, suffering and enlightenment set in a time when Australia was a far more homogenous society than it is today, in line with its White Australia policy. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

At Close of Day – Reflections, by Karel Schoeman (Protea House of Books)

The cover picture is a David Goldblatt photograph titled ‘Sheep farm, near Edenburg, Orange Free State, 16 April 1982

Years ago I read an article in The Guardian newspaper that said something like “old age is terrible – it is much, much worse than you can imagine”.

I was in my early 30s at the time and old age was a long way off, but there was something about the gloomy statement that stayed with me.

And now, finally on the cusp of old age, I have just read Karel Schoeman’s sobering At Close of Day, a book of reflections on age and disintegration and death.

Schoeman, a prolific and award-winning Afrikaans author, updated the manuscript on April 26 last year, when he was 77. Five days later he killed himself.

The book was published in Afrikaans shortly afterwards and has now been translated into English by Elsa Silke. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Last Letter Home, by Rachel Hore (Simon & Schuster)

As recently as 1990 I was still writing and receiving letters, and I have my half of the correspondence to this day. But who prints out and keeps important emails?

Novels based on the discovery of old letters, or on the consequences of a letter that was never delivered, will now need to be relegated to historical fiction.

I suppose Last Letter Home is technically historical fiction, half of it taking place during World War II which is still within living memory, but only just.

There are two narrative threads here, the story of author and historian Briony Wood, set in the present, and her fascination with the lives of a group of people in Norfolk before and during the war. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Two Sisters – Into the Syrian Jihad, by Asne Seierstad (Virago)

The awful news of a deathly attack on worshippers at the Malmesbury mosque on the penultimate night of Ramadaan – apparently by a Somali man – brings closer the world laid bare by Norwegian writer Asne Seierstad in this stark work.

We read the headlines about IS and the devastation of Syria every day, we hear of attacks and beheadings, we see Somali refugees on our streets, but rarely get a glimpse of the human stories behind the news.

Seierstad, a former Norwegian war correspondent whose book The Bookseller of Kabul sold more than two million copies, has detailed one family’s devastation in Two Sisters. It is her non-fiction account of how a pair of teenage sisters, of Somali descent but born and brought up in Oslo, left their family and travelled to Raqqa in Syria to join IS. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

My Father Died for This, by Lukhanyo and Abigail Calata (Tafelberg)

Imagine if you were a three-year-old and this was your first memory.

“Once at the gravesite I remember holding on to my mother’s dress, too afraid of letting go. The up-and-down stamping by toyi-toyiing mourners shook the ground under my feet. I had never felt anything like that before, and I remember being so afraid of the ground collapsing underneath me.”

Despite dredging his memory, Lukhanyo Calata cannot remember a single moment with the father who by all accounts doted on him. Fort Calata, one of the Cradock Four, was murdered by the South African security police in June 1985. His older daughter Dorothy was almost 10, Fort was three, and his younger daughter, Tumani, was not yet born. His wife, Nomonde, was just 26. Continue reading →