Review: Vivien Horler

Leo, by Deon Meyer (Hodder & Stoughton)

Just over two years ago the mysterious Russian cargo ship Lady R docked in Simon’s Town. Its arrival was unexpected since it had turned off its marine tracking system somewhere near Cape Agulhas.

The ship was one of two Russian cargo ships officially sanctioned by the US for involvement in the transport of munitions to Russia to support that country’s war in Ukraine.

Lorries brought containers to Simon’s Town and,  during loadshedding on the night of December 8, 2022, the ship  was loaded in the dark. It sailed for Tanzania early on December 9.

There was enormous speculation – and public disapproval – of the incident, and to this day no satisfactory explanation has ever been made by the SA government. So what really happened?

What if a stash of gold bullion – not munititions – was loaded aboard the ship?

I have no idea how long it takes SA’s prolific and celebrated Deon Meyer to research and write one of his addictive Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido crime thriller novels – but maybe two years is enough? And maybe that’s exactly what happened.

Apart from the stash that was stolen…

The latest Benny and Vaughn novel opens in the bushveld, with beautiful, blonde game ranger Chrissie, who takes people on bushwalks, telling tourists what not do if they’re charged by a lion. (You don’t run, you stand your ground and make yourself look as big as possible. Apparently.)

But Chrissie has a darker side, and is about to be involved in a major heist with a group of serious ne’er do wells, including the rather fanciable Igen Rousseau. (We are never told how to pronounce the first name, but they do occasionally refer to him as Ig.)

It’s all carefully planned, but there’s a major snafu resulting in a lot of dead bodies. Chrissie takes her much diminished share of the loot and heads off to Italy.

But then Igen gets in touch again. Is she up for taking part in a big gold heist?

Meanwhile, back in Stellenbosch, Benny and Vaughn are still hoping to be sent back to the Hawks. It’s also a stressful time for Benny as he’s about to get married, and while he has no doubts about his love, marriage seems to be a big step.

Then the body of a young student, a runner, is found near a mountain trail, and Benny and Vaughn are on the case. She has nasty bites and scratches, and at first glance it looks as though she mighty have been attacked by a Cape leopard.

Except the scratches look wrong, and besides, Cape leopards are vanishingly unlikely to attack people.

The investigation leads to the Stellenbosch home of a former Recce who himself is found dead a few days later. He has been suffocated by someone spraying fast-acting filler foam down his throat.

This looks like the work of professionals who want to send a message.

Benny and Vaughn are up for it all, but then the case is mysteriously taken away from them by high-ups in the police. Something very unsavoury is going on.

You want Benny and Vaughn to beat the baddies, but some of the baddies are extremely engaging, and part of you is hoping they don’t come to too sticky an end.

I can’t say more, other than to proclaim Leo a fiendishly clever, layered, and ingewikkelde story, set in immediately identifiable Western Cape landscapes. I thought it was a great read.

And I’m not the only one – the Afrikaans version of Leo is the winner of the AKTV prize for best Afrikaans thriller of 2024.

These are among the books that have landed on my desk recently. The top four – Breaking Bread by Jonathan Jansen, Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, Catherine, the Princess of Wales by Robert Jobson and Intermezzo, by Sally Rooney – are from Exclusive Books’s top reads for October. Some of these books will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

Breaking Bread – a memoir, by Jonathan Jansen (Jonathan Ball)

Jonathan Jansen is something of a national treasure. He has opinions on everything, primarily on education in South Africa, but he doesn’t confine himself to that subject. He’s been described as a professor, a pundit and even a public nuisance.

His is a prolific writer, has written many books, occasionally more than one at a time. He also writes columns and is often seen on social media.

After a stint as rector and vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State – he started there in the wake of the dreadful racist urination into food  incident – he became distinguished professor of education at Stellenbosch University, and says now he is relieved of administration duties, he can do what professors are supposed to do: think.

He grew up on the Cape Flats, the eldest son of an intensely religious couple called Abraham and Sarah (and yes, he has a brother called Isaac) who were members of what he calls a fervent community of evangelical Christians. This gave him his founding values, and he says while he eventually he left the church, ”in many ways it never left me”.

He frames his life within the broader community, and says an important goal of this memoir  was to give readers a sense of time and place… ”Put differently, this is not simply the straightforward story of a grateful life but one of a resilient community on the Cape Flats”.

Revenge of the Tipping Point – Overstories, superspreaders, and the rise of social engineering, by Malcolm Gladwell (Abacus Books)

Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling The Tipping Point – How little things make a big difference was published 25 years ago, and he wrote that it was “the biography of an idea”. It’s about trends, and what makes them spread, or as he puts it, “ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread, just like viruses do”. The book spent several years – years! – on the New York Times bestseller lists.

The idea for this new book was to revisit some of the ideas published a quarter of a century ago, and then he realised he didn’t want to return to ground he had covered earlier as that world just seemed too different from our world today.

So he started again, and this book is the result. It is ”a new set of theories, stories and arguments about the strange pathways that ideas and behavior follow through our world”.

If it is half as interesting as The Tipping Point he’ll have another bestseller on his hands.

Catherine, the Princess of Wales – The biography, by Robert Jobson (John Blake Publishing)

Princess Catherine was of course always going to be a big story – beautiful, smart and the girlfriend of Prince William. But it seems in this past year or so, as she became the Princess of Wales, and took the public into her confidence about her cancer diagnosis, she has become something more – a person that people from all walks of life can identify with, a mum and – well, just nice.

Robert Jobson is a royal correspondent, and Catherine is only the latest in a number of titles he has written about members of the British royal family, including King Charles, Prince Philip, Princess Diana and Prince William, so he would seem well placed to write this biography.

He has attended many royal events in the UK, been on overseas tours as an accredited royal correspondent, and has met the Princess of Wales several times.

His sources for this biography are numerous, including members of the royal household, both on and off the record.

I noted the pictures in this book do not include the famous one of Catherine in a see-through dress modelling at St Andrew’s University, so could it be this biography is a touch sanitised? Then on the other hand, It seems there is not much to sanitise about Catherine. She seems to be brave and strong, a loving mother and a huge support to her husband.

Intermezzo, by Sally Rooney (faber)

An intermezzo is an interlude, according to Wikipedia,  “a brief show (music or dance etc) inserted between the sections of a longer performance”. Intermezzdo is about two Irish brothers, Peter, a smooth, suave Dublin lawyer in his early 30s, and his much younger brother  Ivan, a competitive chess player and a man who is probably “on the spectrum”.

Their father has just died, and the brothers struggle to come to terms with this. Peter is taking medication to help him sleep, and battling to juggle his relationships with two different women, his first love and a young university student.

As for Ivan, who has always been a loner, he meets an older woman who rapidly becomes an important part of his life.

The cover blurb tells us that “for two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair and possibility”.

The First Murder on Mars, by Sam Wilson (Orion/ Jonathan Ball)

This sort of book is really not my thing, I thought, when I first opened the parcel. Mars makes me think of Elon Musk and weirdos like that.

But it has shouts on the back cover from both Sarah Lotz and Lauren Beukes, with Lotz describing it as: “A fiercely intelligent, wholly engaging thrill-ride of a novel that sucks you in like a black hole.”

So I read the first 27 pages, and I think I’m hooked.

It seems to be the year 2103, and the colony on Mars has expanded, much like the one at the Cape did in the years after 1652. There is the Company Territory, the Free Settlements, and Outlier Territory.

It’s all pretty dystopian, with groups in the Free Settlements fighting each other, and the Company ruling with a rod of iron. Preferred methods of execution are tossing people out of the airlock.

The guard, Dylan, who works nights, gets paid extra for working during the slip, the 37 minutes tacked on at the end of the day to make Earth standard time work on Mars.

Food is grown in domes, and paper is made from vat-grown cellulose.

In his acknowledgements, Sam Wilson refers to a talk given in Cape Town by Khai Staats, who is an expert on the ways humans might live on other planets.

He said something along the lines of: “When people first arrive on Mars, things will be simple. There will be a small group of scientists, all working towards the same goals. Everyone will know each other, and everyone will trust each other. But slowly, the population will grow. People will be born, and people will arrive from Earth, and eventually things will stop being simple. There will be growing inequality and distrust, there will be politics, there will be crime, and eventually there will be murder.”

Which was the seed that fired Wilson’s imagination.

Beeld 50 – Om ‘n groote storie hard te slaan, compiled by Erika de Beer (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

In June this year came the devastating news: Media24 was planning to close down the print versions of several of its newspapers, including Beeld, Rapport, City Press, Daily Sun and Soccer Laduma, as well as the digital editions of Volksblad and Die Burger Oos-Kaap.

Three would continue to be published digitally only – Rapport, City Press and the Daily Sun, while the print version of Die Burger would continue.

So ironically in 2024, the year the Afrikaans daily Beeld celebrates its 50^th anniversary, it looks as though the title is on the chopping block.

The process seems to have stalled while complex negotiations continue with potential buyers and also the Competition Commission, but in July Media24 said it would continue with Section 189 negotiations, basically rentrenchment negotiations. Around 400 jobs could be lost.

So instead of Beeld 50 being a celebration, it may be an epitaph.

Nevertheless, this is a great book, full of pictures, memories, behind-the-scenes newspaper anecdotes and 50 years of SA news stories.

Journalists – not just Media24 journalists – will smile at some of the memories, such as a reporter being told: “ ‘Calf sucks ma-cow dry’ – that’s the headline, write the story to go with it.” Remember phoning in copy on collect calls from a tickeybox – long before cellphones? Typing stories on manual typewriters, with carbon copies (where do you think the email term CC comes from?)

And then 50 years of news stories, from the Fox Street siege of 1975, the murder of Robert and Jeanne Smit in 1977, the Information Scandal, the bombing of Air Force HQ in Church Street in Pretoria in 1983, the dramas of Zola Budd, the ditching of the Helderberg in 1987, the freeing of Nelson Mandela in 1990, the sinking of the Oceanos in 1991, Chris Hani’s murder, the first democratic elections and Mandela’s inauguration in 1994, our winning the Rugby World Cup in 1995, Archbishop Tutu in tears at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996, the death of Princess Diana in 1997, the collapse of the Twin Towers in 2001, Charlize Theron winning an Oscar in 2004, Marikana in 2012, Oscar Pistorius’s murder of  Reeva Steenkamp in  2013, the death of Mandela the same year, Thuli Madonsela’s report Secure in Comfort which was the beginning of the end for Jacob Zuma’s presidency, Covid in 2020, the death of FW de Klerk in 2021, the Zondo Commission into State Capture… a story of our times.

One Pot – Cookbook for South Africans, by Louisa Holst (Human & Rousseau)

A year or two ago I was sent Louisa Holst’s SA Air Fryer Cookbook, long before I had an air fryer, so didn’t male much of it. Then I got one of those useful devices, and found the book a boon.

I’ve since bought several copies for family and friends who were also venturing into this newish mode of cooking.

Now Holst has produced One Pot, and this time I don’t have to wait to try it out as I have several pots.

In her introduction she says this cookbook is for those busy days when you need an easy supper-time solution, whether there’s electricity or not (mostly there is, these days, mercifully).

All the dishes in the book are cooked on the stove top, as long as you have a gas hob (and since nothing is done in the oven, you’ll save on electricity too).

The ingredients are easily available, and the ingredient lists are shortish and economical. Nothing should take longer than an hour to prepare.

There are days, she says, when you might have time to spend hours creating slow-cooked specialities; the recipes in this book, which she dubs weeknight winners, are for the other days.

Chapters include one-pot wonders, which are warming comfort food; flash-in-the-pan foods like stir-fries, short-cut pasta dishes, a chapter on breadwinners – quick bread-based meals like Portuguese steak rolls or chutney chicken vetkoek; recipes ideal for batch-cooking for the freezer; a bunch of rice dishes like fish curry and rice and fragrant spiced pork and rice; and then a whole chapter on stove-top treats – try apple fritters or steamed chocolate coffee cake.

I think this cookbook will be a winner.

Review: Archie Henderson

Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman (Vintage Publishers)

It is said that Russians write long novels because of the long the Russian winter. Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad is just over 800 pages yet it can be read in a month (if you have the time) because its pages move smoothly and easily, the chapters are short, and some of the tedious parts can be skimmed.

When you reach the end, however, it’s not the end. There is a sequel, which almost everyone who has read it, says is a better book. Roland Hingley, writing in the New York Times about the second book, and expecting another gigantic Russian novel, feared it would be just a “gelded fictional brontosaurus”. He says he was pleasantly surprised to find it not so.

Stalingrad begins with Hitler planning a new offensive, a year after invading Russia. It ends with Hitler’s hordes at the gates of the Russian city on the Volga. Life and Fate, which is of similar length, is the sequel and tells how the Russians turned around the battle and, with it, probably World War 2. Those who have read both are right; by the end of Stalingrad I wanted to reach for Life and Fate, just to see how World War 2 ends – well, in the eyes, opinion and imagination of its author anyway. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Sissinghurst – an unfinished history, by Adam Nicolson (HarperCollins)

Sissinghurst is probably best known as the celebrated garden in Kent created by Vita Sackville-West, former lover of Virginia Woolf and also of Violet Trefusis.
Vita and her husband, the British diplomat Sir Harold Nicholson, had a famously open marriage, which was chronicled by their son Nigel in his book Portrait of a Marriage.
Nigel’s son Adam is the author of this book about the glorious estate on which he grew up, and which, like many great estates in the United Kingdom, attracted crippling death duties when Vita died.
One solution was to hand the estate over to the National Trust, an organisation dedicated to heritage conservation in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. But Vita, who had served on Trust committees, was vehement that the Trust would not take Sissinghurst in her lifetime. She wrote in her diary: “Never, never, never. … Nigel can do what he likes when I am dead, but as long as I live no Nat Trust or any other foreign body shall have my darling.”
Continue reading →

Vivien Horler

A writer’s voice – that’s a tricky subject to tackle or even define.

Voice is the subject of the seventh module of the non-fiction writing course I’m doing under the auspices of crime writer, memoirist and biographer Mike Nicol. And even he, vastly experienced writer that he is, has some difficulty pinning down the concept of “voice”.

“What do we mean when we talk about a writer’s voice and how does this affect your writing? And then if I go on to say that this voice is largely dependent on the tone of your prose, you might say, enough now.”

Well, quite. Voice and tone, he says, are the building blocks of style.

“Voice” is the voice of someone with something to say about the world. It’s hard to figure out one’s own voice – the module assignment was to find a piece of our own writing and then analyse it.

But perhaps it’s easier when you’re reading someone else’s non-fiction. I was mildly affronted by the preface of commentator RW Johnson’s latest book Foreign Native. He had, he says, written and published, in London, a memoir about his time at Oxford University.

He then suggested his local publisher, Jonathan Ball, might like to bring out a South African edition.

This is the sentence that got me: “Jonathan read the book and liked it, but felt that Oxford was too far away from the usually more parochial concerns of South African readers.”

Well, that puts us japies in our place.

So far in the course, titled Writing Reality, we have looked at how to write stories, how to introduce characters (and make them characters), how to describe current events, how to draft scenes, and – importantly – how to write dialogue. Dialogue is what brings writing and characters to life. Or as Tom Wolfe puts it (as quoted in Nicol’s course notes: “…realistic dialogue involves the reader more completely than any other single device. It also establishes and defines character more quickly and effectively than any other single device”.

Back to voice. It emerges, says Nicol, from tone, lexicon and grammar. Sentence length is important. Voice and tone create style.

It’s all a touch nebulous – but I can recognise it when I see it, in RW Johnson’s writing at any rate. And what is Johnson’s voice?  It is smug, that’s what it is.

* For more information on Nicol’s courses (which include a fiction writing course, see https://writeonline.pro or email him on mike@writeonline.pro.

 

 

 

 

 

Review: Vivien Horler
A Way Home, by Jillian Sullivan (Potton & Burton)
In an odd little general dealer-cum-coffee shop in a village in New Zealand’s south island I spotted this book and thought it looked interesting.
Newly divorced and 50-something writer Jillian Sullivan decides to fulfil a dream to build a straw bale house. She doesn’t know much about building, but her son-in-law Sam does, and she signs on as his apprentice. “This is a beautifully told and inspiring story, a book for anyone who needs to start again, or has a project bigger than they think possible.”
I didn’t buy the book, but a couple of days later spotted it in the home of friends near Dunedin. In half an hour or so I’d read enough to know I wanted to read it all. It turns out the little general store in Oturehua in Central Otago was down the road from the house Sullivan built, and we happened to be passing back through in a couple of days. So I bought their only copy. Continue reading →