Review: Vivien Horler

The End of Normal – Witness to the unravelling of white power in South Africa, by Max du Preez (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

In 1976, just after the eruption of the Soweto uprising and the killing of scores of pupils by the police on June 16, the eminent academic Franklin Sonn said: “Today it is over for apartheid and the National Party… It’s just a matter of time.”

Fourteen turbulent years later, President FW de Klerk stood up in Parliament, unbanned the liberation movements and announced the release of Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners. It was all over bar the shouting (although there was quite a lot of shouting).

Pondering those 14 years, Max du Preez, journalist, editor, Afrikaner iconoclast and a man with a great sense of humour, writes in this sort-of-memoir: “How did it come about that the National Party government, a self-declared champion of Western civilisation and Christianity, descended into the murky depths of death squads, assassination, poisoning and kidnapping? This is how I understand it. After the 1976 Soweto Uprising, the white government realised that apartheid as an ideology had failed utterly. They understood that it was ‘the end of normal’.” Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Land – A novel, by Maggie O’Farrell (Tinder Press)

Maggie O’Farrell’s historical novel Hamnet has been on our big screens lately, and a great movie – and book – it was too. But I enjoyed Land even more.

Perhaps it is because in this novel she is unconstrained by the historical facts of the life of Shakespeare’s family. Or maybe it is a return to her Irish roots – in any case Land is a great saga of family and place.

It is 1865, and Tomas is a surveyor and draughtsman, mapping Ireland for the redcoats. He grew up in a workhouse, seized chances offered to him, and became a gifted draughtsman.

He has no illusions as to why the redcoats need him: while there are plenty in England who have his skills and more, there are few who have all that plus his local knowledge, who can speak to the people in their own language. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

On the Sponge Islands – Loss and restoration in the Aegean, by Julia Martin (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

Sponges – everyday utilitarian objects of no great interest or value. I have two in the kitchen, for dish-washing and mopping up spills, and another in the bathroom.

Yet natural sponges, harvested from the deep, once made many people extraordinarily rich (think of the analogy of ostrich plumes for the Oudtshoorn feather barons). Even today they can sell for around 30 euros (about R550).

In a prologue to this travel memoir, Cape Town-based writer Julia Martin refers to sponges as “the meekest of animals who live and reproduce without muscles, heart, brain or nervous system”, always retaining their defining quality: porosity.

Martin is charmed: “All day and all night, the ocean flows through, unhindered. Sponges are made of sea, of everything.” Continue reading →

Review: Archie Henderson

Empire of Ink: The printers, rogues, and radicals who invented the American newspaper, by Alex Wright (Basic Books)

Before there was the internet, there was the US Postal Service – the original network where cut-and-paste spread the news long before copy-and-paste ever did.

Alex Wright traces the arc of American newspapers from the 1790s, just after independence, to the late 19th century, when the press swelled to an annual US newspaper circulation totalling 3.6 billion before its slow decline at the most recent turn of a century.

But let’s not go there yet – the history along the way is far too rich to rush. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

The Child, by Alistair Mackay (Kwela Books)

I had never heard of writer Alistair Mackay until I read this, yet it turns out he’s written two novels as well as short stories and columns. And The Child isn’t even his latest book, although it’s pretty recent, having been published in 2024.

Perhaps I wouldn’t have read his first novel, It Doesn’t Have to be This Way, since it’s science fiction, but it was longlisted as best novel for the 2023 British Science Fiction Association, and was also shorlisted for the 2023 SA Sunday Times Literary Awards.

A collection of short stories, The Lucky Ones, was published in 2025.

One review I read of The Child says the narrative could be the reviewer’s own life story. That is not remotely so in my case – the protagonist Benji is a chap, gay while I’m not, married (to another chap), and desperate for a child.

But he’s also a white, middle-class South African who lives in Cape Town, who feels guilty about his good fortune while so many South Africans have none, and has a complicated relationship with Sibs, his and husband Adrian’s domestic worker. Continue reading →