Gillian Slovo: Red Dust

By ELSPETH SANDYS

I couldn't put this book down. It has that page-turning quality usually associated with thrillers or mystery stories, which in many ways is what Red Dust is, a psychological thriller set against the mystery that is modern South Africa.

The country Gillian Slovo shows us is a land tortured by history, climate and a vision of the future at once bright and terrifyingly dark.

Gillian Slovo was a child when her family was sent into exile, but it is clear from her published work that the land of her birth has a powerful hold on her imagination.

In her family memoir, Every Secret Thing, she wrote movingly of the life and violent death of her mother, Ruth First, and of the resentment she and her siblings felt at being the children of prominent anti-apartheid campaigners, whose actions took the family into exile, and led to her mother's death in Mozambique.

Red Dust is set almost entirely in the fictional South African town of Smitsrivier. The story centres around a hearing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, one of many such hearings in South Africa after Nelson Mandela's victory at the polls.

"A circus", is how Dirk Hendricks, former policeman and torturer refers to it, a sentiment echoed by his fellow policeman (now manager of a security business), Peter Muller.

Anyone looking for simple answers will not find them in this book.

Though it lacks the subtlety of Bernard Schlink's The Reader, it deals with the same moral ambiguity. Hendricks was a torturer and a murderer.

So, too, was Muller. But both insist they were following orders, doing what had to be done to protect their beloved homeland from the communist menace.

"In my own way I believe I am a victim," Hendricks tells the judge hearing his application for amnesty before the Truth Commission. "I am a patriot - I was doing only what I thought best."

Into this potent mix of race, history and politics comes Sarah Becant, born in Smitsrivier and given an early training in advocacy by the now dying Ben Hoffmann (who alone in Smitsrivier was prepared to defend blacks in court during the infamous apartheid years).

Ben summons Sarah back from her lucrative law practice in New York to act for Alex Mpondo, one of Hendricks' torture victims, now an MP in Pretoria. The battles that ensue between the characters are as much a part of the story as are the scrupulously careful deliberations of the Truth Commission.

If I have a criticism of Red Dust it is that there are too many twists and turns in the tangle of relationships played out in the book. I found myself longing for a clear point of light in the murk of motive and consequence, loyalty and betrayal, that clouds the pages of this book.

But the conclusion is satisfyingly shocking, reinforcing the author's obvious conviction that in South Africa the only clear point of light is the one that shines naturally on the veldt.

Virago

$22.95