These are among the books that arrived on my desk in October. Some will be reviewed in full later – Vivien Horler
Kruger Speaks – An intimate view of a magnificent wildlife park, by Helena Kriel & Don Pinnock (Struik Nature)
Kruger Speaks is a magnificent guide to the nearly 20 000 sqkm of wild land bordering both Zimbabwe and Mozambique and, arguably, South Africa’s greatest treasure.
It is designed as a meander through the park, starting at the Crocodile Bridge Gate in the south and ending at the Pafuri Gate in the remote north west near Crooks Corner.
In their introduction, the authors say the park is not so much a destination as a presence. And they have tried to get the park to speak, through its people as well as the animals and the general wildlife who live there.
The first of the three main themes is the human stories, told by the people who live in the work, work there and also those who visit.
Then there is the park’s astonishing diversity, from the antelopes described as the architects of the ecosystem to the Big Five and the humble dung beetle (one of the Earth’s greatest engineers, according to a ranger).
And the third element is the journey – “the slow, ruminative, absorbing experience of driving into Kruger and surrendering to its pace”. (In my experience, after a week in the park driving at a maximum of 50km/h, getting back on the national roads where the limit is100km/h or more is terrifying.)
The authors add that beneath all this is the deep contradiction – the park is “both wild and wounded”. The real terrain, they say, is “human – hunger, corruption, courage, trauma. And tracker dogs…”
But their central theme is reverence, and they sat that what stands out is not despair but devotion.
The photography is magnificent and the volume is both the epitome of the show-off coffee table book and a glorious guide to the park’s back story.
A Political Memoir, by Roelf Meyer, as told to Anneliese Burgess (Tafelberg)
Gone fishing. That was the story of how Cyril Ramaphosa and Roelf Meyer forged the unlikely relationship that led to the Codesa negotiations getting over the almost insuperable difficulties that resulted in South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994.
And the relationship evidently continues, because President Ramaphosa has now entrusted Meyer – as South Africa’s ambassador to the US – with the tricky task of restoring our relationship with the unreliable and unpredictable Trump administration.
Meyer was born in 1947 in the small town of Kareedouw, near Tsitsikamma, in the Eastern Cape, where his tiny family – parents and older brother – lived on a small subsistence farm. There was no running water and no electricity, but his mother had studied at a teachers’ training college in Stellenbosch and brought a glimpse of a wider world to Roelf and his older brother Tobie.
But he grew up steeped in the Afrikaner world, being inducted into the Ruiterwacht – youth wing of the Broederbond – when he was 21 and a student at the University of the Orange Free State.
How extraordinary was his subsequent transformation. He credits coming to Cape Town as a law officer for a major Afrikaans investment company in 1972 as resulting in “the first significant crack in his ideological armour”.
By September 1989, as deputy minister for Constitutional Development and National Education, he threatened to quit his position if there were “no signs of progress in negotiations for constitutional reform during the next two years”, according to The Star.
And the rest, as we know, is history.
Since democracy, Meyer has talked peace and negotiation in places as far afield as Northern Ireland, Rwanda and Kosovo.
This memoir looks readable and engaging, and describes a pivotal period in our history.
Our Noble Selves, by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday)
In 1948, three years after the end of World War 2 in Europe, the then Princess Elizabeth made a speech at the launch of the Festival of Britain committee. She said it was hoped the festival, to take place in 1951, “may prove to be not simply an end in itself, but a beginning of many good things”.
Shortly after returning from the East at the end of the war, former Japanese internee Harry Flynn needs to recuperate both physically and mentally.
He is working for a small printing works in Lonson when Gerald Barry, his old boss at the News Chronicle, offers him a job. Barry is part of the Festival Committee, and they plan to show off a recovering Britain on the south bank of the Thames. It’s all to be a beacon for change, a tonic for the nation.
And they’re going to need people who can read.
There is a call for a festival anthology of poems, with prize money, and the organisers expect thousands of entries. There will be top literary judges, but someone first has to go through the “mountains of slush”.
“You want me to read hundreds of bad poems?”
“Yes.”
“All right.”
“You will? Excellent!”
Having read the first couple of chapters, I think this novel looks a delight, reminding me slightly of that brilliant British TV series 2012, set just before the London Olympics and starring Ricky Gervais.
Like the 2012 Olympics, the Festival of Britain is a big project, and things will definitely go wrong.
*This novel is one of Exclusive Books’s top reads for October.
Agency – A memoir of remarkable things, by Ashley Brownlee (Southern Right Publishers)
In an author’s note at the beginning of this engaging autobiography, Ashley Brownlee tells us his book is not a tale of epic adventure – “this is something smaller, shared between us, around a campfire, with nothing but a gazillion burning suns bearing witness from the firmament… the crackling flames of an everyday life…”
Although evidently not that everyday. Brownlee was adopted, after being born at St Joseph’s Sanatorium – now Vincent Pallotti Hospital – and was immediately whisked away from his unmarried mother by righteous nuns.
I remember being told, during a creative writing course, to people my stories with characters who were a little bit odd. I’m not sure if Brownlee was given this advice or just was surrounded by weirdos, but there are certainly some odd people here.
His father had a pegleg, having lost it after an injury during a cricket match, while his mother, besotted by the theatre, never cooked and built several houses without kitchens.
Then there were his godparents, one of whom was the pilot of a helicopter that crashed flying passengers from a Union Castle ship to Cape Town harbour. A young Brownlee, his sister and mother were waiting at the helicopter terminal for a flip. Brownlee says he never saw the actual impact of the aircraft hitting the breakwater, as this mother considerately turned her children away in the nick of time.
His godmother lost a pair of twin sons. “The exact details escape me, but I recall the episode involved a game of hide-and-seek and a collapsing bed”.
The final godfather, a man known as Gay Alan, made a serious miscalculation when one weekend, his longtime lover away, suggested sex with the gardener. “And so it was that Gay Alan was beheaded with a spade and carried, in a flokati rug… to the bottom of the garden where he was buried among the azaleas”.
Young Brownlee became convinced “that adults in the real world, especially those charged with one’s spirituality, were off-the-charts reckless and not to be trusted”.
There is more but you get the idea. This narrative is not necessarily comfortable, but it is always readable and often hilarious.