Review: Vivien Horler

Knife – Meditations after an attempted murder, by Salman Rushdie (Vintage)

Salman Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, was published in 1988 when he was 41 years old. It was highly regarded, being a finalist for the 1988 Booker Prize, and winning the 1988 Whitbread Award for novel of the year.

But Shia Muslims regarded it as blasphemous, and in 1989 Iran’s leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie to be killed. The government of Britain’s Margaret Thatcher provided Pakistan-born Rushdie, who was living in the UK at the time, with 24-hour police protection. He went into hiding for years.

The novel prompted riots and protests, and in some cases people were killed. The Japanese man who translated the novel into Japanese was stabbed to death in 1991. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Cape Fever, by Nadia Davids (Scribner)

The brooding tension that permeates this novel about the relationship between a madam and her servant builds until you start to wonder: “Will she kill her? Don’t kill her!”

Which is a long way from the beginning.

It is 1920, just two years after the end of World War I. Mrs Hattingh, a widow, lives in a street of houses meant “for doctors and ambassadors”. Her son, Mr Timothy, was wounded in the war, but is now practising as a lawyer in London. Mrs Hattingh is lonely.

She needs a cleaner/cook, which tells Soraya Matas, visiting from the Quarter for a job interview, that Mrs Hattingh is not as wealthy as her house suggests. The dark patches on the wallpaper indicate paintings that once hung here have been sold. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Red Tape: The untold story of a visionary South African’s battle against bureaucracy, and the birth of a world-renowned wine region, by Brigid Hamilton Russell (Quickfox)

An international trade treaty with the unlikely name of the Crayfish Agreement was at the heart of legendary wine man Tim Hamilton Russell’s victory over bureaucracy.

The agreement was signed in Paris between the Union of South Africa and the French Republic on February 11, 1935, granting SA the right to export crayfish to France at favourable tariffs, as well as fresh and dried fruit.

In exchange, the Union government agreed SA wine and brandy makers would be barred from using any “appellations of French origin”. So not only could the local industry not call a locally produced wine a Bordeaux or Burgundy, it could not even describe it as made in the Bordeaux or Burgundy style, type or class. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

What We Can Know, by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)

Central to this brilliant novel is a dinner party and a poem no one but the poet’s wife has read.

This sounds rather genteel, but What We Can Know is a great deal more than that – it’s the tale of a literary quest complete with buried treasure, a love story, a terrible crime, a harrowing description of caring for a partner with dementia, and a meditation on the difficulties presented by historical biography.

It’s also a fascinating exploration of what our world could become, with about two-thirds of the narrative set in 2119, a bit over a century hence. There has been the Inundation, the flooding much of the world, leaving the republic of Britain an archipelago of islands. There have been limited nuclear wars, and the major superpower appears to be Nigeria. GPS no longer exists, as satellites reach obsolescence and crash and burn, and it’s not clear how long the internet will survive. About half the world’s population has died. Continue reading →