Barbara Trapido: Frankie & Stankie

Reviewed by CARROLL DU CHATEAU

I agree with Philip Hensher's quote on the cover of Barbara Trapido's new book, Frankie & Stankie: "There aren't many novelists whose stories one doesn't want to end, but Barbara Trapido is one of them."

He's right. Despite a looming deadline I savoured every word of this 307-page story of leaving Berlin and growing up in South Africa, complete with its back story of the rise of the Afrikaners, political exploitation and appalling racism.

Trapido is one of the best female storytellers of our time. Skilfully she weaves the story of Dinah, her sister, mother and badly paid, unconventional, university maths lecturer father, against a political saga as wide as the African veld.

The story is seen through Dinah's eyes, starting when she is a wheezy, skinny girl of around four. At first calling her mother "Dinah's Mum" at every mention seems irritating. The technique slows down sentences and makes it a clumsy read. But soon the voice of the child takes over, the story takes off and Dinah's Mum, sister Lisa and Dinah's Dad become a loveable part of the whole.

The beauty of Trapido's structure is that it is so seamlessly woven together. There is the growing-up story, complete with first day at school and the hideous Miss Vaughan-Jones, spliced together with incidental history - the general election of 1948 fought between two white parties (blacks can't vote), and the Sharpeville protest of 1960 soon after the Pan-African Congress broke away from the ANC.

Anecdotes abound, many illustrating the extraordinary fabric of life during apartheid. There's the story of Ephraim, the black lift attendant in Durban's Stuttafords department store, who is loved by the shop-ladies because he's sympathetic about their tight shoes, aching feet and full-on social lives.

Then one day Ephraim isn't there and a pinched-looking white girl is working Ephraim's lever. He has gone "back to the farm where the golf-ball oranges grow".

Although this is a novel, rather than an autobiography, it reeks of someone who was there - and indeed, Trapido did grow up in South Africa while her husband, Stan Trapido has "a vast knowledge of South Africa's history, along with astute and original takes on it".

In a way then, this is a history book - but what a history book, as Dinah, her sister, friends and finally lover, make friends with their black servants, sew themselves into party dresses, cheek the teachers, endure the Freshers' Reception Committee at university despite their hideous racist, sexist rugby choruses and non-existent necks.

Eventually even Dinah, who is intrinsically more interested in boyfriends, sex and poetry than politics, can't help but get swept up by the anti-apartheid movement, and together with her activist husband flees for the sanctuary of London.

Bloomsbury, $35