Red Dust: A Novel [Paperback]

Gillian Slovo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 2003

"Perhaps the most important piece of fiction yet to emerge from the new South Africa."—San Francisco Chronicle

"Written with the pace of a thriller"—Times Literary Supplement. Red Dust is set in a rural South African town, where three people are about to meet their past. Sarah Barcant has left her law career in New York to assist an old friend as prosecutor on a Truth Commission hearing. Dirk Hendricks, a former police deputy, is being taken in handcuffs to the station where he once worked. There he will confront Alex Mpondo, the man he had tortured, who is now an MP.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This remarkable exposition of a Truth Commission amnesty hearing in a backwater South African town underscores that "the full truth" is more complex than court transcript or verdict can ever reveal. South African police brutally tortured and murdered at will in their unfettered efforts to crush the "terrorist" acts of black rebels against apartheid. Now those rebels occupy the higher branches of government while the offending policemen are imprisoned. Sarah Barcant left the dusty, dead-end town of Smitsrivier 14 years ago to become a successful New York City prosecutor, but drops everything to heed the call of hometown mentor and antiapartheid activist Ben Hoffman. Ben represents brilliant legislator Alex Mpondo at the amnesty hearing of former Smitsrivier policeman Dirk Hendricks, who brutally tortured Alex and knows the truth about the murder of his friend Steve Sizela. Steve's body and killer were never found, and Steve's parents push Sarah to use Dirk's hearing to implicate Pieter Muller, another policeman, never charged, who now runs a security firm in Smitsrivier. Slovo (Catnap; Every Secret Thing), herself the daughter of antiapartheid activists, skillfully handles Sarah's quandary of returning to face her past and reexamine her life in the light of long-term exile. The reader can almost taste the dust and feel the heat of the stultifying locale; the scatter of words in Afrikaans enhances the absorbing, fast-paced narrative. Amnesty hearings are meant to bring closure to the violent period that ended apartheid by forgiving crimes by former officials, where possible. But this powerful novel full of legal and emotional twists and turns strips bare the torment forever ingrained in victim and jailer alike, a torment that runs through all segments of post-apartheid society.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

The author of several mysteries and the memoir Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country, about her life as the daughter of white South African antiapartheid activists, Slovo takes several chapters to hit her stride here, but once she does her latest novel heats up. Sarah Barcant, an expatriate lawyer living in New York, is called back to rural South Africa to help her mentor present a case against Dirk Hendricks, an admitted torturer, for a Truth Commission hearing. The victim, Alex Mpondo, now an MP in the new government, would rather forget the whole horrifying experience. Instead, he is pressured to testify by the father of his close friend, who is desperately seeking closure for his son's death at the hands of Hendricks's boss, former police interrogator Pieter Muller. This compelling tale reunites torturer and victim, exploring issues of guilt and complicity, loyalty and betrayal, and truth and justice. Liberal use of South Africanisms lends authenticity and flavor. Recommended for public libraries and academic libraries with an interest in contemporary South Africa. Christine Perkins, Jackson Cty. Lib. Svcs., Medford, OR
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (February 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393323994
• ISBN-13: 978-0393323993
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #851,579 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Truth? Reconciliation?, February 8, 2006

By 

Ralph Blumenau (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Red Dust: A Novel (Paperback)

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 New York lawyer for so long that she never really understands what (in the author's view, I think) the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was, and what it was not and could not be.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Neither Truth nor Reconciliation, May 21, 2002

By 

"kmw3011" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Red Dust: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Superior Courtroom Thriller, September 16, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Red Dust: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.