Review: Archie Henderson

The Cauldron – The making of the modern Middle East, by Simon Sebag Montefiore (Weidenfeld & Nicolson/ Jonathan Ball)

Sebag Montefiore (the preferred of his two first names) knows how to write a book.

And also how to sell one: he has been on countless podcasts, a guest on talk shows and in interviews at literary festivals.

All are wonderfully informative and hugely entertaining (you can find them on YouTube). The best is on Ask Haviv Anything, a history and current-affairs podcast hosted by Haviv Rettig Gur, an analyst at The Times of Israel, because Gur asks intelligent questions. The most entertaining, despite its tedious interlocutor who doesn’t give Montefiore a chance to punt his book, is from the Montreal Literary Festival.

That’s also because he’s on stage with Salman Rushie, who steals the show, especially with a marvellous line about President Donald Trump: “It’s difficult to respect a man who has bad grammar.” Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Mr Sidhu’s Post Office, by Amman Brar (Juniper/HarperCollins Publishers)

In 1999 the British Post Office introduced computer terminals into local post offices. Most villages and areas had a post office, but they were different from the post offices South Africans were used to.

They were often in a small local shop which sold basic groceries, with the sub-postmaster in his or her own little cubicle.

The computer system introduced was known as Horizon, and the Japanese company behind it was Fujitsu, a major global technology and IT services company.

From the beginning there were accounting problems, which escalated to alarming levels. According to Wikipedia, between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 sub-postmasters were wrongfully convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting based on faulty Horizon data. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

The Life and Death of a Rock ’n Roll Sailor – A true story, by Diane Coetzer (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

Yachtsman Anthony Murray and his sister-in-law Diane Coetzer planned to write a book together about his ocean voyages. But not this one.

Anthony was an experienced sailor who delivered yachts all around the of world. Diane is a freelance journalist, and the daughter of the late lamented writer Owen Coetzer, with whom I worked on the Cape Argus and Weekend Argus for years.

Diane is also the partner of Jeremy, Anthony’s younger brother, who worked in the music production business.

On February 18, 2015, during a voyage delivering a Cape Town-built Leopard 44 class catamaran to Phuket in Thailand across the Indian Ocean in cyclone season, the catamaran and its crew of three lost all contact with the world. It had been expected in Thailand later in February. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

The Homemade God, by Rachel Joyce (Doubleday)

Vic Kemp is a successful London artist who has made a fortune from the sort of work that gets printed on T-shirts, posters, greeting cards and even coasters.

The pictures are semi-erotic depictions of high-heeled women in red lipstick meeting suited men in pools of lamplight. When the only journalist who ever interviews him asks if his work is really about his own sexual fantasies, Vic laughs. If people can’t face a bit of fun between consenting adults, they are fools, he says.

It might not be high art, but it has earned Vic enough to have a flat in London, a studio not too far away, and a crumbling villa on an island in an Italian lake where his four children have spent their summers growing up, learning to swim and smoke and drink. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Motherland – A feminist history of modern Russia, from revolution to autocracy, by Julia Ioffe (William Collins)

Julia Ioffe is a 40-something American-based, Russian-born writer and journalist of great accomplishment – if Motherland is anything to go by.

In her introduction to this magisterial history, told always from the female point of view, Julia Ioffe talks about her female relatives: her sister the oncologist, her mother the pathologist, her grandmother the cardiologist (to whom the book is dedicated) and her great-grandmother the paediatrician.

Americans, she says, consider this history to be extraordinary, but measured against the history of Soviet women of the 20^th century, Ioffe’s forebears were “perfectly average people” who happened to be the products “of one of the most radical social experiments in history: the attempt to emancipate women and build a new Soviet person”.

By 1917, Soviet women were able to vote, and by 1918 they had the right to no-fault divorce and child support, paid maternity leave and free higher education. In 1920 they were granted the right to abortion, provided free by the state – but without anaesthesia. Continue reading →

Review: Archie Henderson

Command – A soldier’s journey in the African battlespace, by Brigadier-General Peter Sereko, with Antonio Garcia (Tafelberg/Jonathan Ball Publishers)

Peter Sereko has had an extraordinary life as a soldier, and Antonio Garcia has helped guide him through that life – and the minefield of writing a biography.

It has helped that both men were soldiers, Sereko rising to the rank of general and Garcia a former combat engineer who left the base for academia.

Garcia is well established as a military historian and author, with books on South Africa’s peacekeeping roles on the continent, the Afrikaner rebellion of 1914/15 and Union Defence Force’s victory over Germany in the early years of World War 1.

Command is Sereko’s first book, one in which his 38-year military career provides a rich vein of material, especially for a young black man joining an apartheid army. But by 1986, when he signed up, it was an army aware of the failings of National Party policy and already beginning to re-think its role in what would become the new South Africa. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Restless Dolly Maunder, by Kate Grenville (Canongate)

Shortly before she dies, around the mid-1950s, Dolly Maunder looks back on her life.

Her generation was the hinge, she thinks: when she was born in the early 1880s the door of female aspiration had been shut tight. Then it began to creak open. “My generation was the hinge that it had to be forced around on, one surface grinding over another. No wonder it was painful.”

This is an Australian historical novel by an acclaimed author, and it was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2024. Kate Grenville has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and been shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award (named after the author of the brilliant book, film and now TV series My Brilliant Career).

She has written more than 10 novels and a handful of non-fiction books. As far as I can recall, this is the first of her novels I have read, and I loved it. Continue reading →

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 →