Sharp side of South Africa
The tensions, threats and insecurities of the new South Africa are refracted through the internal and sexual lives of the Ali family in Dangor's consciously poetic novel.
The marriage of Silas and Lydia slowly breaks beneath the weight of a violent trauma in their past.
History, Dangor suggests, is an inconsolable psychic memory that affects the children of the future as much as the people of the present, and as this dense, painful and luxuriously written book carefully reveals itself, the racial conflicts still percolating through South Africa are pinpointed and explored with a subtle but stinging pessimism.
