Red Dust

I actually had to read this novel for a literature class I am taking. I was pleasantly surprised at how good it is. As far as mysteries go, Slovo does a great job of pulling you along as she creates secrets and mysteries that you want to find the resolution to. I really enjoyed this and would recommend it to those who love a good mystery, especially.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was set up in post-apartheid South Africa, enabled people who had been imprisoned for the crimes they had committed in apartheid times to secure an amnesty, provided they told the full truth about their activities to a court set up by the commission, presided over by judges and with perpetrators and victims represented by lawyers. This novel deals with one such case in a dusty little town called Smitsrivier. Dirk Hendricks, a former policeman now imprisoned, had applied for amnesty in respect of his having severely tortured Alex Mpondo, now a member of Parliament. The powerful middle section of the novel is about the hearing of his case by the Commission. The tense confrontation between Hendricks and Mpondo in court is painful in the extreme. The burly Hendricks, who has been well-briefed by his lawyers and is in any case very familiar with court proceedings, who knows all about psychological weaknesses and is a shrewd actor to boot, is determined to conceal the full truth. Mpondo has for some years tried to bury the memories of what he has suffered, but now they surface and cripple him. Moreover, he is also crippled by something else (which I must not reveal in this review) which both he and Hendricks know but which Mpondo's constituents do not. There is also the undercurrent that the two men are bound to each other by a terrible kind of intimacy. Closely interwoven with the Hendricks-Mpondo relationship is that between Pieter Muller, another ex-policeman, and James Sizela, a black headmaster, desperate to find the remains of his son Stephen whom Muller had killed. While Mpondo and Sizela are very different characters, Hendricks and Muller are, from a fictional point of view, perhaps a little too much alike; and the key confrontation between Muller and Sizela, though it is as tense as that between Hendricks and Mpondo and as powerfully written, struck me as being rather closer to melodrama than to drama. And although the game of bluff and double bluff that is played at the end of the book can be seen as an ironic commentary on the word "truth" in the title of the Commission, it also subtly, but I think unintentionally, shifts the novel from a profound exploration of the psychology of torturer and victim to an altogether slicker level of story-telling. But despite these reservations, I found this book so gripping that I stick with a five star rating. Lastly, a few words about Sarah Barcant, Mpondo's lawyer. She had been born in Smitsrivier and had been trained there as a lawyer; but fourteen years ago, during the apartheid period, she had left for New York. One of the many excellent qualities of the book is her awareness of how much has changed in South Africa during her absence - and how much has not: in particular the eternal landscape of South Africa, its light and its scents, which are wonderfully conveyed. At the end the question is posed whether she had been a Ne

This is an excellent courtroom thriller about torturers and victims confronting each other in the context of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The plotting is superb and the story has enough twists and turns to hold the reader's interest all the way to the surprise ending(s). Certain passages -- and one key scene -- are overly cinematic but this doesn't seriously detract from the book's pleasures. That said, Red Dust is not Dostoevesky. The characters all speak alike (whether white or black, English or Afrikaaner), whites are more finely drawn than blacks, and the protagonist -- a South African practicing law in the US -- is the least necessary character in the book (basically, she gets in arguments). Disappointingly, Slovo doesn't provide much social context or use the novel to educate readers about the liberation struggle in South Africa.

A fantastic read. This book deals remarkably well with the complexities of ambiguous truths in the aftermath of Apartheid era South Africa. Slovo does an excellent job of presenting the harsh realities of those interrogated and tortured by the security aparatus as well as the truth as seen through the eyes of the perpetrators. Reminiscent of the work dealing with military dictatorships in South America: "A miracle, A universe: Settling accounts with torturers." Wonderfully written.

This book has definitely been 'doctored' for an international audience (too many changes have been made to South African terminology), probably in order to make the book 'accessible' to US readers, and the story loses a bit in 'local color' and credibility as a result. The themes are well-worn, but given a new twist by placing the story in a Karoo town and making the chief protagonist, Sarah Barcant, a young South African who has settled in New York and whose reactions on a trip back home to the world she left behind are tracked step by step through the story. Sarah reluctantly returns to Smitsrivier for the duration of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing at the request of an old mentor and friend, Ben Hoffman, and is largely repelled by all she finds there, despite its bone-chilling familiarity. The impact on her of her encounter with the truths the TRC unearths (literally as well as figuratively)does not in the end appear to be more than superficial: indeed, her final decision (after allowing her dying friend to believe she will stay on to serve in her home country) is to return to NYC, to "an ordinary life unmarked by the contours of heroism, sacrifice and guilt." It is a decision easy to understand, but it leaves us as voyeurs on the sidelines of a drama which is, in fact, one of immense tragedy, playing itself out on a stage which we as outsiders can scarcely comprehend. As such, this is good courtroom drama, but lacks the depth and moral passion of great fiction. And given the importance of Slovo's subject matter, this reader wishes she had done more with it.