“That a life could be so easily taken without justice or recognition was a lesson he’d learned in childhood. Leading a company of soldiers through war confirmed that nothing was sacred or precious. It was strange how, after four years of training and fighting, the memory of his mother’s death still lurked in the shadows, ready to ambush the present.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (SEP 11, 2010)

Swaziland-born Nunn’s second 1950s South Africa novel opens with a prologue in 1945. Series protagonist Emmanuel Cooper, a major in the South African army at the time, comes across a murdered washerwoman in a Paris doorway and immediately abandons the night’s pleasures to stay with the body until the police arrive: “…it was an insult to abandon a body in a city where law and order had been restored.”

The main narrative opens in May 1953 in Durban and while Cooper remains true to his convictions, his life has gotten more difficult. After his unpopular success solving the murder of a police captain out in the veldt (A Beautiful Place to Die), he finds himself thrown off the police force and racially reclassified – a hazardous position in apartheid South Africa.

Doing some undercover work for his old boss, the Afrikaaner Major van Niekerk, spying on smugglers in the city dockyards, Cooper discovers the body of a murdered white boy, with two young Indians, one a would-be gangster, nearby. Fear replaces defiance when Cooper (falsely) identifies himself as a cop.

“With the National Party now in control, the police had become the most powerful gang in South Africa. The air went out of the Indian’s hard-man act.”

In 1950s South Africa, to be a non-white suspected in the murder of a white is to be already convicted. Cooper recognizes the child – a slum kid who ran errands along the port – and notices that the boy’s notebook, in which he recorded orders, is missing.

But the night is not over for Cooper who encounters the first in a series of reversals. Undaunted, he continues his surreptitious investigation into the killing until finally he is arrested for the boy’s murder and a couple more besides. Though the (planted) evidence is airtight, Major van Niekerk manages to spring Cooper from jail, giving him 48 hours to solve the crime or be re-arrested.

The characters come from various race classifications and nationalities and each has secrets, including Cooper, who’s haunted by the voice of an old soldier. “Like a vulture, the voice of his sergeant major from army basic training eight years previous appeared only when there was a fresh carcass to feed on. If the Scotsman was here in Durban, that could mean only one thing.”

And, of course, there is a woman, Lana, a beautiful confederate who seems to thrive on risk as much as Cooper does and who reveals a new aspect of herself – and another dangerous secret – with every appearance. As the relationship develops Cooper grows to understand more about himself and the women in his life:

“Lana disappeared around a corner, hips swinging, heels clicking. It was no wonder his marriage to Angela had failed. He’d asked too much of her. His buried childhood, the war, police work and an attraction to women with experience of life’s dark places…he couldn’t change who he was. There was no cure for the past. Whether or not he got out of this, he resolved to write Angela and wish her well.”

The one thing all the characters (including a couple from Nunn’s first novel who reappear in Cooper’s life) have in common is fear. Apartheid permeates every aspect of society; the police and the even more dreaded Security Services are the face and might of apartheid.

Nunn, a screenwriter, has a visual way with words and a knack for the noir turn-of-phrase. Introducing a secondary character who will play a fairly substantial role in the story: “The driver of the Chevrolet was a skinny white woman who’d given up being a blond. A trench of dark brown hair ran down the center of her head like a deserted landing strip.”

And a gangster’s Indian guard: “Closer up, Emmanuel saw that the guard was one of those men whose life was best summed up by a series of ex’s. Ex-boxer, ex-wrestler, ex-barroom bouncer.”

The plotting is complex and suspenseful and every scene conveys the sinister feel of South Africa’s apartheid culture. Cooper’s ambiguous racial classification has a suspense all its own.

Cooper’s decency is rock-solid and his character develops with experience. Though Nunn’s books stand alone, you may want to read the first to get the full enjoyment of Cooper’s growing complexity.

Nunn’s fans are also likely to enjoy Deon Meyer’s gritty novels of contemporary South Africa – his second Insp. Benny Griessel novel has just released – and the wonderful apartheid-era crime novels of the late James McClure, featuring white Lieutenant Kramer and black Sergeant Zondi. Most of McClure’s novels are out of print, but Soho Crime has set out to remedy that. McClure’s first two, The Steam Pig and The Caterpillar Cop have been reprinted in paperback this summer, with the other six to come over the next couple years. Highly recommended.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 16 readers
PUBLISHER:	Washington Square Press; Original edition (April 20, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Malla Nunn
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: A Beautiful Place to Die

Bibliography:

• A Beautiful Place to Die (2009)
• Let the Dead Lie (2010)
• Blessed Are the Dead (June 2012)

“There are rules. Use them. In any case, you can do what you want, it won’t change. I have been a policeman for over twenty-five years, Fransman, and I’m telling you now, they will always treat you like a dog, the people, the press, the bosses, politicians, regardless of whether you are black, white or brown. Unless they’re phoning you in the middle of the night saying “there’s someone at the window” – then you’re the fucking hero. But tomorrow when the sun shines, you’re nothing again. The question is: can you take it? Ask yourself that. If you can’t, drop it, get another job. Or put up with it, Fransman, because it’s never going to stop.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (SEP 10, 2010)

Deon Meyer’s books just keep getting better and better. His newest thriller, Thirteen Hours, had me on the edge of my seat from the first chapter. For those readers not familiar with Meyer’s previous books, his novels take place in his homeland of South Africa with this novel taking place in Capetown. The book is a roller coaster of a read with several different plot lines vying for precedence at the same time and each of them as compelling as the other. The book takes place in a time period of thirteen hours, hence the title.

We first encounter a young American named Rachel who is running for her life. Her friend Erin has been murdered with Rachel as a witness. Rachel was able to escape and the murderers are chasing Rachel through the outskirts and city of Capetown by car and by foot. So far, she has managed to evade them. At the same time, the police are dealing with the murder of a music studio executive, Adam Barnard, who is found murdered in his home with a gun near the hand of his passed out alcoholic wife, Alexa Barnard. Both of these murders are being investigated simultaneously with alternating chapters dealing with each.

The protagonists of this book are strikingly characterized. This is one of Meyer’s gifts. Along with all the action, we are privy to perspicacious and uncommonly careful characterizations that are rarely encountered in thrillers. The head detective is Benny Griessel, an Afrikaans inspector who is hoping to be promoted to captain. Currently his job description is vague, but he is supposed to mentor new inspectors. Benny is a recovering alcoholic with 156 days of sobriety. He is separated from his wife because of his alcoholism. One of the requirements for their reconciliation is that Benny remain sober for six months. He and his wife are supposed to meet this very evening to discuss the future of their relationship.

The novel talks about the different races of the inspectors – Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, or coloured. Benny, an Afrikaans, is mentoring Vusi Ndabeni, a Xhosa man who is responsible for overseeing Rachel’s case. Vusi needs to learn how to be more aggressive in his interrogations. He has a gentle but strong spirit. Benny is also mentoring inspector Fransman Dekkker, a coloured man of mixed ethnicity who is sexually addicted and is in charge of the case of Adam Barnard, the murdered music executive. Then there is Zulu inspector Mbali Kaleni, a female detective who is not accepted among her peers because of her gender but she is also very fat. She is described as smelling of Kentucky Fried Chicken all the time though no one sees her eating it. “She looked like an overstuffed pigeon – short, with a big bulge in front and a big bulge behind in her tight black trouser suit. Large handbag over her shoulder, service pistol in a thick black belt around her hips and her SAPS ID card hanging from a cord around her neck, probably because no one would believe she was a policewoman.” Mbali is working on both cases and has a very good detective’s instinct. Benny is her mentor as well.

This book deals excellently with several sub-topics that are very important, especially racism and addiction. Benny’s alcoholism is dealt with realistically and he is involved in AA and has a sponsor. He feels a certain sensitivity towards Alexa Barnard because of her alcoholism. She was once a famous singer but her husband, a sex addict, has ruined her sense of self-worth with his non-stop escapades and she has turned to alcohol. Fransman Dekker is getting a lot of insight about his own sexual addiction by working this case. His personal insights, once there, are stunning. Along with addiction, the book deals with the changing quota system that the police department is constantly dealing with. Quotas change depending on who is in power. Right now there is a push for more Zulus and Xhosas, and less coloureds. This makes Fransman Dekker very angry. His anger often gets in the way of his investigations and as Benny mentors Franzman he reveals how his own anger kept him from being promoted several times. He is trying to help Fransman to keep more of an even keel so that he can succeed in the department. There are several languages spoken by the investigators depending on what race or ethnicity they are. Some of the ones I noted while reading this novel are Xhosa, Zulu, English, Afrikaans, and Shona. This can create cultural misunderstandings and linguistic difficulties between colleagues.

This is a remarkable novel in so many ways. It is literary fiction at the same time that it is a thriller. It deals with deep issues without sermonizing. Most importantly, as a reader, it is hard to put down. It keeps up the interest from the very first to the very last page with no rabbit trails or deus ex machina. The plot is complicated but very easily followed because of the quality of Meyer’s writing. It is a novel for just about anyone who wants a wild ride through a fantastic book.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 29 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atlantic Monthly Press; (September 7, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Deon Meyer
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Blood Safari Dead at Daybreak Heart of a Hunter

Bibliography:

• Dead Before Dying (1999;May 2006 in US)
• Dead at Daybreak (2000; August 2005 in US)
• Heart of the Hunter (2003; July 2004 in US)
• Blood Safari (August 2009 in US)

Inspector Benny Griessel:

• Devil’s Peak (March 2008 in US)
• Thirteen Hours (September 2010 in US)

“Humanity. The greatest plague the planet has ever known…too many people…If a man must choose between wealth and conservation, wealth will always win. We will always overexploit, we will never be cured.”

Book Review:

Review by Mary Whipple (OCT 3, 2009)

Setting his novels in contemporary South Africa, Deon Meyer raises the bar for thrillers by infusing each of his novels with the national political tensions—historical, racial, and economic—and the urban and rural disparities which make the country so complex and so difficult to govern. His “heroes” have traditionally been far from “heroic” in the traditional sense, always people at odds with society, especially in the case of Lemmer, main character (and hired bodyguard) in Blood Safari, a man who has allowed his passions to dominate him to the extent that he served time for his assault on four men and gained pleasure in killing the ringleader—“I felt at one with the world, whole and complete, good and right. It’s a terrible thing. It intoxicates. It’s addictive. And so terribly sweet.”

Lemmer, working for Body Armor, the premier bodyguard service in the country, has been hired to watch over Emma le Roux, a wealthy young woman who, after seeing a news story on TV, believes that her brother Jacobus le Roux, thought dead for twenty years, is, in fact alive after being a suspect in a mass murder in Kruger National Park—the death of a sangoma (a traditional healer) and three elephant poachers. Emma herself has recently been targeted by unknown assassins and has barely escaped from her house after a violent attempt on her life. She has no idea whether her suspicions about her brother are correct, nor does she have any idea what motive might inspire evil-doers to attack her so viciously.

Her brother Jacobus, four years older, was always interested in conservation, especially the conservation of the animal life in South Africa, and he worked at the Kruger Park, where he disappeared twenty years ago. A man calling himself Jacobus de Villiers has worked at the Moholololo Rehabilitation Center, which nurses ill and wounded vultures, and at a private reserve, run by a multimillionaire, which tries to keep large areas of the veld free of development for a natural animal habitat.

As Lemmer and his client, Emma le Roux, try to find out if the Jacobus de Villiers whom she saw on TV is, in fact, her brother, they are exposed the life-or-death infighting among the various conservation groups, their relationships with conservation police and local law enforcement, and the relationships and conflicts of these groups with developers and local tribes who want a piece of the tourist game-park action. Violence is a way of life for these people, and Lemmer is often in the cross-hairs of his and Emma’s unknown enemies.

Meyer is careful to include all the players in the game here, allowing him to present all the facets of the big picture regarding the wildlife bounty of the country and the lures of development, the commitment to a lawful country under unified rule and the every-man-for-himself attitudes which have undermined every aspect of the country over the years. No one knows whom to trust, if anyone, and no one knows what secret arrangements any of the players may have made with sleazy operators or money-mad groups which exist outside the mainstream. As the characters develop more fully, and as the author reveals more and more information about their backgrounds, the reader’s stake in the outcome becomes more and more powerful. The action comes fast and furious, and the suspense builds.

Meyer creates vibrant scenes, describing the environment, the local settings, the animals, and the racial interactions of South Africa’s citizens in vivid detail. The people who oppose Lemmer’s investigation are understandable in their reluctance to go along with him, and their points of view are broad and not tritely black or white. Irony abounds, and the political and social repercussions of the action become understandable even if they do not always draw the reader’s sympathy. This is a terrific and unusual thriller, the fifth of Meyer’s novels, all of which are written in Afrikaans and translated, and each of which has been better than the last.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 37 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atlantic Monthly Press (August 25, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Mary Whipple
AMAZON PAGE:	Blood Safari
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Deon Meyer
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our reviews of: Dead at Daybreak Heart of a Hunter

Bibliography:

• Dead Before Dying (1999;May 2006 in US)
• Dead at Daybreak (2000; August 2005 in US)
• Heart of the Hunter (2003; July 2004 in US)
• Devil’s Peak (March 2008 in US)
• Blood Safari (August 2009 in US)
• Thirteen Hours (September 2010 in US)

“Joan glanced behind her to make sure that the pair of burnished brass piano pedals that had materialized in the taxi were with her now. They were. She was glad of that, for this was their first visit in a week and she was eager for their company.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Kirstin Merrihew (SEP 14, 2009)

Natural elements of the periodic table, music, aging, war, and human relations uniquely coalesce in Richard Mason’s newest novel.

Natural Elements is the present-day story of Joan McAllister, a woman in her seventies, whose forty-something daughter, Eloise (also McAllister), gently but firmly deposits her in an elegant nursing home called The Albany. Before they return to London to accomplish this move, the two take a trip to South Africa, home of Joan’s ancestors. Eloise, a high-powered investment fund manager, returns to England prematurely on a business emergency, leaving her mother to sort through some family history on her own.

Joan is not only elderly but is slowly exhibiting more and more symptoms of an Alzheimer-like disease. She, a gifted pianist, has visions at the very beginning of Natural Elements of piano pedals, a benevolent, comforting sign to her. Later, the pedals become elusive and other less benign visions overtake her. In fact, the latter portion of the novel traces Joan’s unsettling blending of memories and earlier family history as her illness progresses. Joan, a woman who calls nearly everyone “dear,” has, throughout her life been accustomed to rather passively accepting what others dished out. In synch with that, she isn’t told directly by either The Albany’s staff or her children (besides Eloise, she has a son, George, who lives in Australia) of her affliction, so she resists treatment and lives her dreams as if they were reality.

Eloise, besides worrying about her mother’s deterioration, has dug herself a pit at work. She interpreted an off-hand comment by her French metallurgist former lover, Claude Pasquier, about an element called osmium as a cue to buy millions of dollars of it. Now she must deal with this market’s plunge, and it could put her into bankruptcy, not to mention jail. It could also curtail her mother’s first-class care.

A great deal of effort has gone into Natural Elements. Details embrace every plot advancement, and every major character advances in some significant way during the course of the story. To begin with though, Eloise is a not-untypical single woman who has foregone a family for her privacy, comfort, and profession. Will her priorities change? George isn’t in distant Australia by accident. What made him run, and will he return to face the music? Claude needs a catalyst like Eloise to inspire his genius, but they don’t communicate well. Will he make an effort to change that? Will she?.

And Joan. She is eccentric but very likeable, especially in the early parts of the book. Left to fend for herself in South Africa, and finding in that a chance to relax and express herself, Joan spends time in a museum near what was once her family’s farm. There, she gets to see and touch heirlooms, including a journal kept by her grandmother, Gertruida van Vuuren. Reading it shows Joan the horrors members of her family endured in the concentration camps they were forced into by the British during the Anglo-Boer War at the beginning of the twentieth century. It also reminds her that her mother warned her not to marry an Englishman — a warning she did not heed and lived to regret.

Joan, the hub of the book, becomes the main embodiment of an ability to cope while simultaneously using what is at her disposal to attempt to rectify past injustices and mistakes. She develops a poignant comradeship with a South African taxi driver and guide. She forges an innocent friendship with a young man while staying at The Albany. She uncovers an unexpected connection to family of a British physician who was assigned to a concentration camp hospital during the Boer War. She investigates crimes possibly committed by the doctor. She faces old wounds inflicted by her mother-in-law’s decades-long interference and her volatile husband’s inability to constructively channel his own wounds. She is a woman who represents her era: “She did not belong to a generation that set much store by the articulation of private sorrow — and there were no words, in any case, for the shifting complexities of what she now felt.” But, in the end, she is also admirably indefatigable in the sense that she refuses to allow her circumstances to completely remove her ability to act.

In a sense, in this story, Joan and the rare white-blue metal element, osmium, can be seen to function as curious literary analogues. Real life 2002 tests of osmium’s “compressibility” indicated it was “stiffer” than diamond under high pressure. Natural Elements builds plot on that data with this hopeful but possibly fanciful match-up: “Osmium and diamond were now protagonists in an eternal drama, a battle between opposing forces of titanic strength, and in some mysterious way they had become subject to the indisputable laws of narrative. It would be osmium, the poor relation — ignored, neglected, dismissed — that triumphed over its glittering rival in the end, and secured an old lady’s future.” Osmium cannot, in its original state, rival diamond as an industrial cutting agent despite its compressibility. But perhaps as an amalgam it could surpass diamond in tensile durability and be used where diamond cannot be. Osmium, the 76th element may only reach its industrial use potential if it is forced into an unnatural but transforming symbiosis with another element. In other words, it needs a kind of element “graft” to become so valuable that Eloise’s huge investment in it would pay off. Similarly, Joan minus her affliction, didn’t gain the impetus to become more assertive, more powerful. Perversely, when her dementia grafts on, it propels her into an oddly anomalous but potent state.

Joan’s immersion in her Afrikaans history is an effective vehicle for Mason to inform the reader that the inhumanity of concentrations camps existed before Germany, Japan, the U.S., etc. interred people. As Mason notes in his Afterword, “Although Gertruida van Vuuren’s journal is a work of fiction, her experience is representative. Everything that happened to her happened to someone….” He adds, “I dedicate this book to my great-grandmother, Naomi Cecilia de Klerk, who was incarcerated in a British concentration camp as a young woman. Several of her family died in captivity, including her mother and her favorite sister, Sarie.”

For many readers, the moving passages of Gertruida’s testimonial, signed, “This 3rd day of October, 1903,” may deal out the most shocking revelations of the novel. However, as Joan’s hallucinations and delusions intensify, many other family secrets, including domestic violence rooted in someone’s torture during World War II, are revealed to have exacted harsh tolls. What begins as a relatively congenial mother-daughter story shifts into far more flagitious territory. As Joan slips further into her spliced imaginative/real world, the jumbled nightmare feeling builds for the reader as well. The novel’s conclusion is simultaneously a small triumph and a loss — as life itself often is.

Natural Elements is a curious amalgamation of topics, as mentioned, but it inventively and flourishingly mingles science, history, psychology, music, medicine, geriatrics, various sensibilities and perspectives,and family drama. For all its diversity, identifying a unifying theme doesn’t pose a great challenge: the resilience of human beings who suffer is demonstrated on many scales, and the natural elements in the novel, both material and existential, certify and nurture that resilience. The elements of our histories, our circumstances, and our DNA shape us all, but will they weaken us or make us stronger? This novel contemplates that question in a singular fashion.

Bibliography:

• The Drowning People (1998)
• Us (2004)
• Natural Elements (March 2009) (Note: A.k.a. The Lighted Rooms (2008)
• History of a Pleasure Seeker (November 2012)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (March 17, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Kirstin Merrihew
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Richard Mason
EXTRAS:	Orion Publishing interview with Richard Mason
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More books that blend science with literature: The Solace of Leaving Early by Haven Kimmel Evidence of Things Unseen by Maryann Wiggins Measuring the World by Daniel Kelman