Monthly Archives: July 2024

How the vice head boy of a top Joburg school took the term vice too literally

Review: Vivien Horler

High Times – The extraordinary life of a Joburg dope smuggler, by Roy Isacowitz and Jeremy Gordin (Jonathan Ball)

We’ve all heard of small-time dope smugglers and sellers being arrested, but hardly ever hear of the kingpins going to jail. Who are they and what are they like?

This book is about one such kingpin, and he certainly went to jail. And he was once vice head boy of King David School in Joburg, nogal.

The subtitle of the book is a little misleading, because while Michael Medjuck certainly grew up in Joburg, he left SA right after school – he had a Canadian passport – and settled in Vancouver.

And that was where he became a dope maestro, smoking, smuggling and selling marijuana and hashish, living well with numerous foreign bank accounts for 22 years – until he was arrested in Seattle in the US.

And that turned out to be very bad news indeed, since the US attitude to drugs was a lot more rigorous than in Canada. Continue reading

Bedside Table Books for July

These are among the books that landed on my desk this month. The first three: The Forgotten Names, by Mario Escobar, The Paris Affair by Maureen Marshall, and The Future, by Dion Chang, Bronwyn Williams and Faeeza Khan, are among Exclusive Books’s top reads for July, along with This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud, which was reviewed on The Books Page on Sunday, July 21.

Some of the books mentioned below will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

The Forgotten Names, a novel by Mario Escobar (Harper Muse)

Remember the story of Moses? Pharoah had ordered the killing of all Hebrew boy babies in Egypt, but one mother could not bear it. She put her little son into a basket and pushed him off into the treacherous waters of the Nile.

It so happened that very day Pharoah’s daughter went down to the river to bathe, and came upon the basket caught in the reeds, with the baby in it. She took him home and brought him up, and changed the course of history.

The mothers in this extraordinary story did something similar. Early in World War II Klaus Barbie, the “butcher of Lyon”, ordered the deportation of all foreign Jews in France. In one internment camp, Venissieux, a group of people – clergy, civilians, the French Resistance and others – realised an ambiguous order from the Vichy government forbade the deportation of children abandoned by their parents.

So the mothers of 108 children gave up their rights to their children, not knowing if they would ever see them again. And of course they did not.

Fifty years later, French law student Valerie Portheret was doing research into Barbie when she came across the story of the children of Venissieux, and resolved to track them down and reunite them with their true identities. It took her 25 years, but she did it.

The Forgotten Names is a novel based on this extraordinary episode. WW II, and specifically the experiences of Jews in Europe, continue to be a rich source.

The Paris Affair, a novel, by Maureen Marshall (Grand Central)

It is 1886, and an impoverished Fin Tighe is an engineer, working on an exciting project: the building of the Eiffel Tower, which is to be a centrepiece of the upcoming Exposition Universelle and an advertisement for Parisian technological skills.

But not everyone in Paris is keen on the tower, fearing it will ruin the city’s skyline (today, of course, if your apartment has a view of the tower its value is at a premium). And even though the design has been accepted by the organising committee, the furore has meant the government is withholding its promised five million francs.

Now everyone working on the project is told to do what they can to raise money. Fin, who is gay and the illegitimate son of a British earl, meets Gilbert Duhais, wealthy and connected, who persuades him to claim to be the earl’s heir as a way of raising money.

Fin’s enthusiasm for the Eiffel project is palpable: “The mathematical precision involved – hundreds of thousands of joints and angles measured to the 10th of a millimetre – not even the Romans would have dared anything close at the height of their arrogance.”

While homosexuality is not illegal in the Paris of the time, it is not approved of, and Fin finds himself vulnerable. And when a friend is murdered in the rooms above a secret gay club, Fin finds himself in an increasingly dangerous situation.

Looks intriguing.

The Future – More than 80 key trends for South Africa, by Dion Chang, Bronwyn Williams & Faeeza Khan (Tafelberg)

If things seem to be speeding up and the world appears to be less comprehensible than before, it’s not that you’re getting old (although that could be a factor too) – things really are becoming stranger, according to the Flux Trends team.

This book is based on the Flux Trends annual State We’re In Trend, an annual summary of where the world is now and where it’s heading. “Not only does it feel as if we’re losing a sense of reality, but that the world is unravelling,” say the authors.

The current decade “started with the pandemic, which sped up the undercurrents of change already underway since the last decade: a contactless economy, a lockdown life audit that fast-tracked the ‘future of work’, simmering geopolitical tensions, the harsh realities of climate change and the reconfiguring of our social contracts”.

So the authors have produced this book to help us navigate uncharted waters. It describes key trends with insights on what to do so that companies and individuals can turn challenges into strategy.

The trends described fall under six broad headings: technology, retail and marketing, the economy, the natural world, diplomacy, and socio-cultural.

You are Here, by David Nicholls (Sceptre/ Jonathan Ball)

From the first two chapters you have an idea of what’s going to happen. Marnie lives in London where she works from home as a copy editor. She is lonely, but also resistant to getting out more.

Michael is a geography teacher, based in York, who has been increasingly solitary ever since his wife left him. He feels happiest on long solitary hikes, and certainly doesn’t want to see friends or meet people.

Both of them are friends with Cleo, Michael’s boss, who tries hard to get them out of their shells, but they are uncooperative. Until one day both agree to join a group hike across England from the Irish Sea to the North Sea, a distance of 190 miles.

Not all of them plan to do the whole hike, and Marnie is a complete novice, but judging from the first couple of chapters she does agree to go further than planned. And then, according to information on the back cover, “Marnie and Michael suddenly find themselves alone on the most epic of walks and on the precipice of a new friendship… But can they survive the journey?”

A charming humour shines out from the first few pages I’ve read. David Nicholls’s novel Us was long-listed for then Booker, and one critic says: “No one does the minutiae of love as well as Nicholls.”

GQ writes: “Witty and moving at the same time, it’s a figurative and literal journey that might even have you hunting for your walking boots.”

This looks fun.

And now for a slew of SA historical non-fiction.

Rhodes and his Banker – Empire, wealth, and the coming of Union, by Richard Steyn (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

The first Johannesburg branch of the Standard Bank opened in October 1886, just after the diggings had been proclaimed. The bank has been central to SA’s story, and one of its earliest bosses was Lewis Michell, a Cornishman, who arrived at the Cape in the early 1860s.

In Richard Steyn’s preface he tells us Michell had helped expand the bank into southern Africa’s leading financial institution before and during the Anglo-Boer War.

Rhodes banked with the Standard, and eventually he and Michell became friends. Michell came to admire Rhodes as “a great man”, and worked hard to promote Rhodes’s reputation in South Africa and Rhodesia.

When Rhodes died in 1902, Michell left banking and spent the rest of his life promoting and protecting Rhodes’s legacy, also writing the first Rhodes biography, becoming chairman of De Beers Consolidated Mines, and playing a key role in the Rhodes Scholarship programme.

Steyn tells us Michell was a committed diarist and letter writer, and was able to comment on many of the issues and the people of the day.

This looks interesting.

Botha, Smuts and the First World War, by Antonio Garcia and Ian van der Waag (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

The ground of Smuts, Botha and World War 1 seems to have been comprehensively covered, most recently by Richard Steyn, who is the author of Jan Smuts: Unafraid of greatness and Louis Botha: A man apart.

However, it has been welcomed by historians, with Professor Gary Sheffield of the University of Wolverhampton, Kings College London and the University of Buckingham writing: “The authors, by placing the SA experience into the wider context of the war effort of the British Empire, have written a book that is relevant to global as well as national history”, describing them as having taken an innovative approach.

Another reviewer, Professor Alex Mouton of Unisa, says Botha and Smuts’s military and political careers have until now not been covered in comprehensive fashion, and that there is a significant gap in the historiography…” which this book has plugged.

Commando – A Boer journal of the Anglo-Boer War, by Deneys Reitz (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

In 1899, aged just 17, Deneys Reitz joined a commando and rode off to war. He was well connected, being the son of the former Orange Free State president FW Reitz, and becoming a protégé of Jan Smuts.

He turned up wherever the action was, and kept a journal. He was with Smuts in Namaqualand when the peace was declared. After the war he became a bittereinder, refusing to swear allegiance to King Edward VII, and going into exile in Madagascar, along with a brother and their father.

While in Madagascar, and aged just 21, he wrote the manuscript of Commando, based on his war journals. Eventually, desperately ill with malaria, he was persuaded to return to what was now the Union of South Africa by Smuts’s wife Isie, who nursed him back to health.

The manuscript, written in Dutch, was translated into English and edited and abridged, to be published by Faber & Faber in 1929. This edition reportedly omitted negative remarks about the British, notably Lord Kitchener.

Now, nearly 100 years later, Emeritus Professor Fransjohan Pretorius of the University of Pretoria, has retrieved and annotated the original manuscript, which runs to 1 147 pages, and Jonathan Ball Publishers has published it, once again in English.

I loved the Faber& Faber version for its freshness and youth and first-hand account of extraordinary times. I look forward to reading this edition too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sweeping story of a family misplaced and displaced by war

Review: Vivien Horler

This Strange Eventful History, by Claire Messud (Fleet)

South Africans know all about diasporas. So many people have come here, seeking a better or less unstable life: Eastern European Jews in the early 20th century, Britons after World War 2 (of which I’m one), later as the wind of change blew across Africa, white Kenyans and Northern and Southern Rhodesians, Mozambicans and Angolans.

Then South Africans started to leave, to Britain and the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, mainly white, but joined today by an increasing number of black South Africans, forming a diaspora of their own. And now we have new diasporas here, Somalis, Rwandans, Congolese, Malawians, Zimbabweans…

People will always move, and trying to stop them is like bailing out a boat with a colander. Continue reading

Scientist, secretary, sister and spy – this is an epic page-turner

Review: Vivien Horler

Mr Einstein’s Secretary, by Matthew Reilly (Orion)

If you had a life as, well, interesting as Hanna Fischer’s, you too might like to retire from it all in your mid-40s.

This page-turner of a rollicking novel, albeit with some very dark moments, opens with Hanna’s funeral on a freezing January New Jersey day in 1948. The person delivering the eulogy is the great Einstein, who was handily Hanna’s neighbour when she was a bright little girl in Berlin in 1912.

Hanna is a fictional character, but many of the people she comes across in this thriller are only too real.

When Hanna meets Einstein he has not achieved worldwide fame, and works from a modest apartment in the city. Apart from being brilliant, he is also interested in the people around him being, in Hanna’s words, boundlessly enthusiastic – for physics, for discovery, for life, for the sheer pursuit of joy. Continue reading

Three local crime writers earn their stripes

Review: David Bristow

Circle with Three Corners, by AnB Love (Europe Publishers)

Undercover, by Alan Haller (Meteoric Publishers)

Triad, by Monty Roodt (Meteoric Publishers)

Three who-dunnits landed in my postbox recently. I am not that big on crime novels, but here were these three, each by a local writer and all published outside of the conventional system – which was what initially caught my writer-editor-publisher attention. Also, that I happen to know each author variously.

Respectively, this is their second, third and fourth book in a series, and all three happen to be surprisingly good. However, knowing the writers did not prevent me from lambasting two of the earlier works in previous reviews.

Some of the problems with either self-publishing, or going the pay-to-play route, is that your work is not given the attention and quality that a conventional house will lavish on your darling.

First up is the mysterious AnB Love’s Circle With Three Corners (Europe Publishers).

Emily, who is obsessed with her mother’s insoluble murder, meets game rancher Daniel de Randt in London, follows him back to his game ranch in the Lowveld and all hell breaks loose.

She finds herself entangled in a big-game poaching intrigue. Going back to London all cloak-and-dagger, she stumbles into a nest of crooked politicians, “skin” clubs and the sex slave trade.

Refreshingly, the author is a woman who brings a very personal point of view to a very male milieu. She does seem to have an uncanny – and titillating – insight into the London skin-club business.

For this, as well her break-out Imprinted Curse (which I have not read), she went the “vanity” or pay-to-play publishing route. Basically, you put down around R30,000 to get your manuscript copy edited (no quality input), printed and put on Amazon.

In some cases you are obliged to buy a few hundred copies. So you are down to the tune of some R50 000 before you’ve had a sale. And I know from long and hard experience, the selling is when the really hard work begins.

In the case of Circle – which I was asked to vet – the original manuscript was exceptionally well polished and that shows. But the cover is a derivative AI-looking image which is a hallmark of this method.

Next up is Undercover by Alan Haller (Meteoric Publishers)

This is the fourth in the Sopwith Jones series of crime adventures. The first two were issued by the Martin Macauley pay-to-play system, and it showed – in the worst way. With the next two (including Undercover) Haller went through Meteoric, a garagista publishing operation based in Bathurst in the Eastern Cape.

I’m guessing that it is partly through hard practice, but also due to a more caring publishing relationship, number four sees the author really coming of age as a crime writer.

It’s a crooked tale about the cocaine trade in East London and thereabouts, a part of the country I happen to know and love, and one the author clearly knows as well. In this one you absorb the sense of place, heading out on dirt tracks along the Wild Coast to smoke out the gang kingpin, to the seedy streets of this faded old colonial outpost the locals call Slummies.

It also features a motorbike gang, something the author clearly knows stuff about (along with a love of airplanes) as he takes us down the highways and byways of Slummies, to Somerset East and Kologha on the back of a Harley. It is said best writing comes from what and where you know, and it shows here in heaps.

Lastly Triad by Monty Roodt (Meteoric Publishers)

The cover tells us this is No 3 in the Bathurst Chronicles featuring full-time Rhodes academic and part-time crime solver Bernie Bernard, his office being the pub at The Pig and Whistle in Bathurst, where he lives.

For the record, Roodt is pretty much Meteoric, having launched it to publish his own books but also some others under contract (we were together in journalism school yonks ago).

That did not prevent me giving his first crime novel (Dead Man’s Land) a pummeling when asked to assess it. One of the issues in self-publishing is that expenses are high. Therefore one tends to call in favours from friends and family to help edit, proofread, design and the like, and it usually shows.

But third time round and Triad is a tour de force in the genre. (The second in the series, The Shining Path is also a blockbuster.) The basic premise is that local academic and part-time sleuth Bernie’s idyllic life is threatened when he comes upon the murder of a neighbour at his beloved beach cottage at Cannon Rocks.

This puts him in the cross hairs of an abalone and rhino-horn poaching syndicate that is linked to a Chinese Triad.

This also puts him in, as they say in Boet-en-Swaar country, diep innie kak. There is hardly any let-up in this one and we are, metaphorically, holding our breaths on every page, as the story races from The Pig and Bernie’s invaded home in Bathurst, to a secret Gqeberha abalone warehouse, back to Cannon Rocks and finally a private game farm that is mired in dirty business.

As in Undercover, the sense of place here is intimate and palpable. You feel Bernie is the kind of oke you’d like to buy a dop when next you stop over at The Pig – arguably the oldest watering hole in South Africa, but you can debate that with the locals.

All three novels can be found in some bookstores, Takealot and Amazon.

  • David Bristow is the founder of Southern Right Publishers, a writer and author, and former editor of Getaway magazine.