An ACT OF TERROR [Hardcover]

Andre Brink (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 15, 1992

From the internationally acclaimed author of A Dry White Season comes a riveting thriller about apartheid that encompasses all the racial and political strata of contemporary South Africa. Two lovers and fellow terrorists attempt to assassinate their country's president, but things go horribly wrong.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Enormously ambitious, dauntingly long and written with a profound knowledge of his country's landscape and people, this latest work by the author of A Dry White Season could qualify as the Great South African Novel. By far Brink's most impressive accomplishment to date, it touches a myriad of bases. Thomas Landman, a young news photographer from an old Boer family, has gradually become caught up in the struggle for racial justice. He has joined an anonymous Organization that performs terrorist acts designed to undermine the apartheid government; at the start of the book he detonates a car bomb that, intended to assassinate a provincial president, kills a number of bystanders. The rest of the narrative is a study of his family, horrified by his act; the police brigadier obsessed with his pursuit and capture; people he meets as he makes his getaway; friends and colleagues in the Organization; and, above all, the two women in his life, Nina and Lisa. The former is a fellow terrorist, the latter, encountered by chance, links her destiny with his. Brink has enormous range: he penetrates with seeming ease a dozen personalities, from poor black schoolteacher to pitiful white army recruit to coldly ambitious judge to sorrowing mother, so that the book is at once a psychological study of a country and an often breathtaking chase thriller. In a novel that aims so high, inevitably there are flaws: the style occasionally becomes ponderous, the personality sketches sometimes reduce the tension, and the people in the Organization are almost inhumanly self-controlled and noble. Still, the thoroughness with which the South African psyche is explored and the high intelligence and empathy with which the nature of terrorism is dissected combine to create a memorable political panorama. Most of the book was clearly written in the height of anti-apartheid passion, and the rather lame closing pages, in which Landman wonders whether all the agony was necessary in view of the current rapprochement, are inevitably anticlimactic. But Brink has risen splendidly to the challenge of a major theme, and his book will stand as a salutary reminder of a terrible time.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

A young Afrikaner is drawn into a conspiracy to assassinate the president of South Africa. The attempt fails, leaving black and white bystanders dead in its wake, and he flees consumed with grief but still convinced of the rightness of his actions. There are echoes here of Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter ( LJ 7/79) and Marge Piercy's Vida ( LJ 1/15/80), but Brink's story is wholly his own. The novel moves back and forth with ease among the varied voices that comprise Thomas's life--family, lovers, terrorists, blacks, pursuers--to expose the corrosive effects of a vicious and corrupt system on its supporters and opponents alike. The novel is not comfortable to read, for its burning indignation leaves no room for moral complacency. Yet Brink sympathizes with the plight of oppressor as well as oppressed; everyone pays in a system of absolute injustice. There will be few books this year as good as this, and none that moves the heart as much.
- David Keymer, SUNY Inst. of Technology, Utica
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 848 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; First Edition edition (January 15, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671748580
• ISBN-13: 978-0671748586
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 2.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,727,458 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best big books I've read., July 26, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: An ACT OF TERROR (Hardcover)

There are few people who can capture all the complexity and paradox of South Africa in modern times as Brink can. This book may be big but it crystallizes a time in South African history that was very real, scary and complex.