Customer Reviews

Manly Pursuits

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Having lived in both Cape Town and Oxford I looked forward to getting lost in this book. Maybe I was just missing the point, or maybe I expected too much, but instead of beguiling it just annoyed. On the positive side, the use of different times and spaces concurrently worked well, but the introduction of so many famous faces from the past... Just flashing familiar faces and building on their stereotypes does not make it an interesting historical novel. I will admit that I may be being too hard on this book, it has after all been given great reviews, but of the three people I know who've read it, each being from Oxford and/or Cape Town, no-one has found that it warrents its reviews.

If you don't know the history of South Africa, this book will baffle you. Great to have Google to figure out what the heck she is talking about most of the time. But that isn't the book's worst fault. It is essentially a pseudo novel of manners. Even the best novel of manners (i.e., Henry James) is dreadful. You know - entire chapters about the lifting of an eyebrow. It dulls an exciting, intriguing series of historical events. Nearly all the text is innuendo about the sexual proclivities of the characters or about meaningless trivia such as the instruments in the home of the mother of a minor character. Yes, I got it - the Afrikaaners were full of unrestrained life and could make music, playing on home-made clay flutes, for instance, while the repressed Victorian Englishmen, like the British birds transported to the Cape, could never sing and were destined to die. Still, there are just all these loose threads and endless detail about characters that are not woven together for nearly three hundred pages, and then only loosely and lifelessly. What could have been a suspenseful plot had no more spark than anything else in the story. The central character, stepping wildly out of character for no apparent reason, tries a daring theft to try to stop the Boer War - but this entire episode has no more oomph that the loss of a baby tooth by the little Afrikaaner girl. I mean, the man did a truly dreadful thing in his youth, an abhorrent act of animal cruelty that results in his father's death, and it is just mentioned lightly in a sentence or two and then dropped. As though something like that might not be pivotal in the character's life or psyche. Just bizarre. I actually went back twice to re-read it, to be sure that's what it said, as I couldn't imagine something of such enormity treated as a snippet of text.

It is fine to fictionalize history, but there are superfluous appearances of Rudyard Kipling and his family, Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde, and so on.

All in all, a dreary book.