Stephen Hayes's Blog, page 14

Much Ado about Vaccination

I never got vaccinated as a kid, because my father was some kind of health nut, and was a conscientious objector to vaccination. He had a special certificate of exemption for me, which had to be shown whenever I enrolled at a government school, because in order to attend, one had to show that one had been vaccinated or specially exempted. 

So when I went to school all the other kids had visible "vaccination marks" on their arms, but I didn't.

My father never explained his objections to vaccination to me. He was an organic chemist, and sometimes talked quite a lot about vitamins and things like that.He was an atheist, and while my mother sometimes read me Bible stories and nursery rhymes and fairy stories at bed-time, my father would read me stories from his biology textbooks -- about sea urchins and liver flukes and monads and such, and from the illustrations they were just as monstrous as any dragons, giants, ogres and the like. 

Looking back, and trying to interpret with hindsight, I think my father believed that boosting the immune system with vitamins was more effective than vaccination. Back in those days the compulsory vaccinations were only for smallpox, and infection with several common diseases of early childhood was supposed to confer immunity, and I think my father tried to get me infected. or at least hoped I would be. I did get chicken pox, and had to stay away from school with all of six spots. I think I got whooping cough, and definitely had pneumonia and amoebic dysentery before the age of 7. The pneumonia required penicillin injections every four hours day and  night, and I developed a deep hatred of them at the age of 4. Penicillin was a new drug in those days, but my father seemed to have no objections at all to that.  Again, I never discovered why he objected to some kinds of medicine but not to others. The amoebic dysentery seemed to cause doctors to get into a tizz when I was grown up and put it on applications for employment. I had hardly been aware of being sick, and it entailed interesting visits to the doctor and examining bugs under microscopes, which was quite interesting to a 5-year-old. 

I got measles when I was 11 and at boarding school, and that was the worst headache I have ever had in my life. The headache went after the first couple of days and the main suffering for the next fortnight I had to spend in the school infirmary was boredom -- no reading allowed. Several other kids got measles after me, so we spent days making every conceivable design of paper aeroplanes. But if a vaccination could have prevented that headache, I would have gone for it. 

A couple of years later there was a polio epidemic, and the beginning of the school term was delayed for a week to try to prevent it from spreading. Later that same year a vaccine for polio was discovered. Too late for our generation, but our kids had it.  

But eventually the vaccination thing caught up with me. The government decreed that from 1 July 1964 one would require passports and vaccination certificates to go to Lesotho. I had a passport, but no vaccination certificate, so I went and got vaccinated at the age of 23. I wondered what my father would think of that, but as I was over 21 and had in any case not seen him for several years, I couldn't think of any reason not to be vaccinated. So I went to the district surgeon's clinic and got vaccinated, and the certificate, and two days later I was sick as a dog, and could not finish an essay I had to write for university. It would have been a lot easier to be vaccinated as a child, because then the adult booster would have had little or no effect. 

We went to Lesotho, and where there had previously just been a road and a bridge and a police post on the Lesotho side, there was now a sea of mud and a prefab hut with an immigration officer on the South African side. There were five of us in the car, and only two of us had passports -- they had only been a requirement for four days. The customs man said he would let us through if the guy on the Lesotho side did, but he would not let us back without vaccination certificates. So before going out on the town in Maseru we all went to the hospital for the unvaccinated to be vaccinated and get certificates. They had all been vaccinated as children, so it didn't make them sick, and the customs man was as good as his word -- he let us back without passports, but inspected all the vaccination certificates. 

And in subsequent travels, some places have also insisted on certificates of yellow fever inoculation as well. Those yellow certificates have been a requirement for international travel for most of my adult life, at least until smallpox was pronounced extinct. So I find it difficult to understand all the fuss about "vaccination passports" in social media. What planet have those people been living on?

I've gone into some detail to explain why:

I've never understood the reasons for objecting to vaccination.I associate such objections with atheismIt seems odd to me to accept some forms of medical treatment and not others. 

And I wonder if a lot of the fuss has been caused by the way social media work. 

Facebook, for example, wants to keep its users engaged and on their site. One way of doing this is by encouraging them to get involved in angry arguments. To get them involved in such arguments, give them an "Angry" symbol to tag posts with, and give posts that provoke the use of such symbols more exposure. Such posts are usually those that describe people who take the opposite point of view as stupid and or evil. You can report trolls on Facebook, but the biggest troll is Facebook itself, because its algorithms say, in effect, "Let;s you and him fight". And the bigger the fight and the more angry the reactions, the more eyes on ads, and the more profits for Facebook. 

We were vaccinated against Covid earlier this month. The thing was well organised and painless -- the Department of Health told us when and where to be vaccinated by SMS, and told us that we had been recorded as vaccinated within five minutes, also by SMS. But I'm not putting an "I've been Vaccinated" thingy on my profile pic on Facebook, or saying anything more about it there, other than a link to this post, because that seems calculated to promote a fight from which none but Facebook (or whatever other social media site is involved) can profit.

Smugglers at Whistling Sands - a children's adventure story

Smugglers at Whistling Sands by George Chedzoy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Four children on a seaside holiday run unto a bunch of smugglers, and decide to spy on them to see what they are up to. Predictably, they get into trouble, and have an exciting and rather scary adventure.

Does it sound like Enid Blyton? That's because it is. Author George Chedzoy says he is trying to write something like Enid Blyton's "Famous Five" stories, because he thinks there are not enough such stories, and that is something I can applaud. As C.S. Lewis once famously said to his friend and fellow author J.R.R. Tolkien, "If we want more of the kind of stories we like, we shall have to write them ourselves."

At least one reviewer compared my children's books Of Wheels and Witches and The Enchanted Grove with the "Famous Five", and I'm not sure the comparison was appropriate. I'd perhaps have been happier if he had compared my books with those of Alan Garner, whose children's books I thought there weren't enough of, but in the case of Smugglers at Whistling Sands the comparison with the "Famous Five" is entirely appropriate. My books, like Alan Garner's, though also adventures of kids on holiday, have an element of fantasy, which one does not find in the "Famous Five", nor in this book.

Not only does Smugglers at Whistling Sands fit into the Enid Blyton genre, it is actually far better. George Chedzoy simply writes better than Enid Blyton. There are still some Blytonisms. There is food porn, but not very much, and it is played down. There are the obligatory exclamation marks, but two or three in a chapter rather than two or three in a paragraph, and they are used in more appropriate places. There is nothing of the "What a surprise!" kind of thing, which I find so annoying about Enid Blyton.

In Smugglers at Whistling Sands Louise Elliott, aged 12, rather lonely and neglected by her parents is bored in their holiday cottage on the North Wales coast, but makes friends with three siblings, Jack, David and Emily Johnson, who are staying in a nearby caravan park. David by chance overhears a conversation between two men about landing something valuable on an island. The children conclude that the men are smugglers, and decide to play detective and investigate. They sail to the island in Louise's boat, and find a briefcase full of American money, so their suspicions seem to be justified, and they decide to investigate further...

When I was a child I never cared much for the "Famous Five". I found them dull and predictable, and the characters were stereotyped, each having one characteristic that dominated everything. Of the works of Enid Blyton I far preferred her "of adventure" and "secret of" stories, such as The Mountain of Adventure, but i think I would have enjoyed this one very much when I was about 10 years old. So if you know a child who likes the "Famous Five", do them a favour and give them this -- it's far better.





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The Power and the Glory

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the third time I have read The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene, which is set in Mexico in the 1930s, when the Roman Catholic Church was being persecuted by the revolutionary Mexican government. This story is about a priest on the run from the police, knowing that if he is caught he will face a firing squad. 

The previous time was nearly fifty years ago. Though I remembered the main plot outline, I had forgotten many details. This time I read it soon after reading two others by the same author, Stamboul Train, and The Quiet American, and I think this one is by far the best of his novels.

Perhaps because I was more familiar with it I noticed different things about it on the third reading. The first thing that struck me was the quality of the prose, which struck me as much better than the other two books, and also better than most other fiction I have read recently.

When I first read it at the age of 22 I was quite harsh in my judgement on the whisky priest protagonist. His last thoughts recorded in the book were an admission of failure.

He felt only an immense disappointment that he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all. It seemed to him, at that moment, that it would have been quite easy to be a saint. It would only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage. He felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He knew that at the end there was only one thing that counted -- to be a saint.

Any my main thought when I finished reading the book was "What a pity that he missed it, that he didn't show a little self-restraint, a little courage.

But reading it when older, I see it differently. We can only ever come to God empty-handed. And God can use even our failures. Everything that we do that is worthwhile is the Holy Spirit's work, and all that isn't is our interference. 

Also, since becoming Orthodox I tend to see things a bit differently. In the Orthodox Church the Sunday after Pentecost is All Saints Day. Being a saint is the effect of the Holy Spirit in the life of a person. We also, soon after Pentecost, celebrate the fathers of the various Ecumenical Councils. It is the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost that makes these things possible. 

And for Orthodox Christians, the primary sign of the acquisition of the Holy Spirit is not, as it is for Pentecostals, speaking in tongues, but the acquisition of a merciful heart. And this is what struck me most on this third reading of this book -- that the whisky priest, whatever his failings, acknowledged those failings, and acquired a merciful heart.

So at this reading I came to a different conclusion: he didn't feel like a saint, and just for that reason he was one.






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On The Road With Al and Ivy: A Homeless Literary Chronicle

I never much liked the published version of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, but the original "scroll" version, described in this blog post, sounds much more interesting. I'll be on the lookout for a copy. On The Road With Al and Ivy: A Homeless Literary Chronicle: On The Road With Al and Ivy: A Homeless Literary Chronicle - May 2021:

In 2009, the unpublished 1951 version of Jack Kerouac's book, "On The Road" was released and gave many of the admirers of the 1957 version a chance to revisit the work and it's legacy.

Allen Ginsberg, the legendary Beat poet and close friend, felt that the 1957 version of the book had removed much of the "mad energy" and life of Kerouac's story. Which is true, the Original "Scroll" version, which was typed out on eight long sheets of drafting paper and taped together into a single scroll, differs in some important ways.

The 1957 version was toned down, particularly in sexual details like the sexuality of some of the characters and all of the people in the book were given fictitious names. Which given the straight laced atmosphere of the 50s era, wasn't surprising, and using the real names of living persons can make any book risky to publish.

The Original Scroll (like it's later published version) had an episodic approach to story telling, moving from one scene to another as it appeared in Kerouac's head, as opposed to events tied to a linear time frame. He spends time in the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, yet describes very little of what he saw. Days or weeks are often covered with a single sentence, yet many pages are devoted to conversations with a friend or friends, and if he's waiting for money to come via mail (or wages on payday), he'll just skip over to it's arrival and then the narrative becomes full again.

The first book of Jack Kerouac's that I read, back in 1960, was The Dharma Bums, and I liked it a lot better than On the Road and indeed most of his other books. When I first heard of Jack Kerouac, he was presented to me as a pilgrim of the Absolute, and a symbol of a counterculture. I could find those easily in The Dharma Bums, but not so easily in On the Road. But perhaps reading the original scroll version will give a different view.

New meanings for old words: Based

I knew what "based on" meant, but then I started seeing some strange usage of "based" on social media. People started talking about things being "based" off, or just "based", and I didn't know what they were talking about. 

I asked on the question & answer site Quora, but no one there was able to tell me. I then asked on Twitter, and Duncan Reyburn kindly gave me the answer:

'Based' is almost equal to Heidegger's notion of authenticity. It's a complement[aic], usually meaning something like 'courageous or not caring what others think'. The opposite of 'based' is 'cringe'. 'Based off' (usually with an 'of') at the end is just bad English for 'based on'.

So I post this in case anyone else was wondering what these expressions meant. 

"Based" looks as though it might be quite a useful word, but I'm not sure about "cringe". Cringe is what I do when someone utters opinions that are not based. Perhaps the older "politically correct" is more appropriate there -- uttering opinions because you think it is politic to do so because you fear the power of those who hold them. But yes, that is cringing too. 

"Based off" is somewhat different. I did know the meaning of "based off", it's just that people seemed to be using it in contexts where it made no sense. Something could, for example, be "based off the coast of Italy", meaning that it was based on an offshire Island somewhere. Back in the 1960s there were pirate radio stations based off the coast of Britain, on ships out at sea. In those contexts the usage makes sense, but in the ways I have seen it used in social media recently it did not. Unless "off" is the new "on" -- "Turn off the light -- it's too dark to see in here.". 

 

 

She plays with the darkness

She Plays with the Darkness by Zakes Mda
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Zakes Mda tells the truth about southern Africa, in that he gives a good picture of life and what makes people tick in various parts of the subcontinent; in this case, Lesotho. People sometimes distinguish between "character-driven" and "plot-driven" novels, and this one is definitely character driven.

The protagonists are the ambitious materialistic Radisene, who is always pursuing get-rich-quick schemes, and his mystical rather other-worldly sister Dikosha. They grew up in the mountain village of Ha Samane, and Zakes Mda paints a picture of village life which one cannot help but feel is authentic (Mda, though born in South Africa, grew up in such a village in Lesotho when his parents became political refugees). Like most small rural communities, Ha Samane thrives on gossip, and everyone knows everyone's business, with the exception of Radisene, who moves to the capital Maseru as soon as he leaves school. And Dikosha, who lives in a world of her own, with people of the past.

There are other memorable characters too. There is Sorry My Darlie, the professional soccer player who incites Radisene's envy and ambition with his affluent lifestyle, but he is also consumed by a hopeless unrequited love for Dikosha. There is the policeman, Trooper Motsohi, whose fortunes rise and fall usually in opposite cycles to Radisene, and also with the political changes in Lesotho, which are punctuated by coups. So when Trooper Motsohi is in the ascendant, Radisene's fortunes decline, but when the wheel turns their positions are reversed, and as the story progressed I was constantly reminded of the Tarot card of the Wheel of Fortune, which seemed to apply to the lives of many of the characters.

I remember the 1970 coup in Lesotho, when Prime Minister Leabua Jonathan, on discovering that he had lost an election, got the army to seize power and keep him in power. At the time we thought it was Greek-style democracy, as a group of colonels had seized power in Greece three years earlier in similar circumstances. This was featured in the film Z. A couple of years later the same thing happened in Chile. There was a saying, "Where there's a coup, there's a Colonel" and we used to speak of "Colonelissimo in Excelsis Leabua Jonathan". But what we didn't realise at the time was the extent of repression of the the ordinary citizens of Lesotho, which Zakes Mda brings out in his book.

It is a rather sad book, as we follow the lives and fortunes (and misfortunes) of the main characters, but also there is the feeling of life going on, seed-time and harvest, births and funerals, continue as people appear on the scene and depart.

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Puck, plague and history

King Of Shadows by Susan Cooper
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A surprisingly moving story about an orphan boy actor who is magically transported 400 years back from the 20th century to the original Globe theatre, where he performs in A Midsummer Night's Dream which he had been rehearsing for in his own time) and meets William Shakespeare himself.

This was the third book by Susan Cooper I'd read in the last couple of months, and I liked it a lot better than her The Dark is Rising. It invites comparison with another book I read not so long ago -- Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill -- see my review here.  

Both books feature Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream, and in both books children are plucked out of their own time into the past and discover something of past history. But I think Susan Cooper tells a better story, and tells it better than Kipling. I think Kipling's Kim is far better than his Puck of Pook's Hill, and have read that several times, but Kim is a spy story and a Bildungsroman, not fantasy.

King of Shadows also features bubonic plague, and reminded me of another historical fantasy book that featured that, which seemed appropriate reading for our times of quarantine. For more on that, and other plague-time reading, see Physical distance and social proximity in a time of plague.

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American culture through South African eyes

Cion by Zakes Mda
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first book of Zakes Mda that I read was Ways of Dying, featuring Toloki, who decides to be a professional mourner, and appears again as the protagonist in this book. But I read it 20 years ago, so I can't remember much of it, and perhaps I need to read it again to understand this one.

In Cion Toloki has achieved some success in his career as a professional mourner in Johannesburg and is touring the world to study professional mourners in various cultures. He does this at the instigation of the mysterious sciolist, who I cannot remember from the first book at all. 

St Chad's College, DurhamI would like to know more, because the first place the sciolist sent Toloki to was Durham in England -- more specifically to Durham Cathedral, to the tombs of St Cuthbert and St Bede. And the sciolist himself appears to be connected with St Chad's College, just over the road from the cathedral. I am particularly interested in that because I spent two years studying at St Chad's College, one of them in a room with a view of the chapel of Nine Altars at the Cathedral, and the other with a view looking the opposite way over the River Wear and Kingsgate Bridge, and the People's Gin Palace, officially known as Dunelm House, now threatened with demolition after 60 years, whereas the cathedral has stood for about 900, all of which can be seen in the picture (taken from the tower of Durham Cathedral). So I really would like to know more about the sciolist.

In this book, however, Toloki spends only a short time in Durham, apparently as a tourist, but stays for more than a year in the small hamlet of Kilvert in south-eastern Ohio, where he spends much of the time with the Quigley family, Mahlon and Ruth, and their grown-up children Obed and Orpah. And the rest of the book is about a South African's attempts to make sense of the contradictions of American culture as shown in the microcosm of one family.

There are excursions into the family's past where some ancestors had been slaves in neighbouring Virginia, and it tells the story of the escape of two of them across the Ohio River, which is the River Jordan in the mythology of the slaves. And perhaps by some strange coincidence I had recently read and reviewed Seven Days to Freedom by John Davies. who has quite a bit to say about the symbolism of the River Jordan and the Ohio River in relation to slavery and freedom.

The message of the Bible has been transmitted across the centuries, and its symbols carry a rich cargo of meaning. It tells us that there is a ‘Red Sea’ for us to cross out of our present condition, and a ‘Jordan’ for us to cross into a new world. ‘Jordan’ remains still a boundary in the Middle East – a physical, social, and political symbol of the most intransigent of the world’s troubles. But also, ‘Jordan’ is, for many of us, the boundary which we look forward to crossing when we die. But also again, the original singers of songs like ‘Deep River, my home is over Jordan’, were slaves in the southern states of the USA, yearning for an escaperoute. For them ‘Jordan’ was the Ohio, the boundary between the southern slave-owning states and the free.

Reading Zakes Mda's book so soon after reading that made both seem more real. Part of the mythology of the slaves, and their descendants, involves the making of quilts, which, according to family legend tell the story of escaping from slavery.

In Ohio, the family ends up being a representative mix of most of the ethnic groups that make up the USA -- Shawnee, Cherokee, slaves of African descent, Irish and various "Caucasians", described by Toloki with a wry sense of humour, yet he grows to love them for all their foibles and idiosyncrasies, and they grow to love him with all his.

This is not my favourite book by Zakes Mda, perhaps because the cultural setting is so unfamiliar to me. I have spent only two weeks in the USA, and saw only a small part of it. Mda has spent much longer, and presumabably knows it better. What I do know, however, is that his books set in southern Africa, where he grew up, books like The Madonna of Excelsior and Black Diamond tell the truth about South Africa. They tell it like it is, and was. And so I suspect that his observations on American culture and American history in this book are spot on too, and that what he writes about slavery and slave life are substantially accurate.

Much of the book is written in the present tense, which I found a little strange, and I'd be interested in reading the reactions of Americans to this book, especially those who live, or have lived, in Ohio and Virginia.

On a more personal note, which doesn't really belong in the GoodReads review, is that I compared the experience of Toloki in a strange culture with my own, and with a chapter of a book I have been editing. 

The book chapter is about the reverse -- people of African descent in the New World who emigrated to Africa, mainly to places like Liberia and Sierra Leone, and whose attitudes to the local African people tended to be very similar to that of European settlers in Africa. 

When I went to England to study, I left in haste, because a security policeman wanted to give me a banning order which would have prevented my going overseas to study. With 8 months to wait before the term at St Chad's College started, I worked as a bus driver in London, and lodged with a landlady from Sierra Leone for seven months. But unlike Toloki, I was rather shy and retiring, and only really spoke to the landlady, Mrs Williams, when I paid the rent each week. Even after seeing them in church one Sunday, at St Leonard's Church in Streatham, I didn't speak to them much. I was too shy even to ask how the hot water system in the bathroom worked. Only towards the end of my stay did I begin to have actual conversations with the daughter, who was finishing high school and planning to go to university, and we talked about subjects we studied and things like that. 

So reading about Toloki made me think that I had missed really getting to know the family I was staying with, and the only real human contact I had was when I crossed London to visit other people I had known in South Africa. Toloki's relationship with the family he stayed with had its ups and downs, but in the end it seems that on balance both he and they benefited.

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The Dark is Rising

The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When a reviewer of one of my books, Of Wheels and Witches, compared it with this one, and suggested that it might have been influenced by the The Dark is Rising sequence, I thought I'd better read it. So I read Over Sea, Under Stone which I enjoyed a lot, and now have read this one, which I didn't enjoy quite so much, and in writing this I'm trying to work out why I gave the first book 5 stars, and this one only 4.

There is little to link the two books. Over Sea, under Stone was set in Cornwall, this one is set in Buckinghamshire, with a completely different set of characters. Will Stanton is the youngest of a family of nine children, and discovers , on the day before his 11th birthday, that he is an "Old One" and that he has a quest to perform, to collect six signs made of different materials.

 

He is helped in this by a more experienced Old One, Merryman Lyon, who is the only character who seems to have been in Over Sea, Under Stone, and another family who live on a nearby farm, whom he discovers are also Old Ones, and he is hindered in his task by a couple of characters called The Walker and The Rider.

*** Possible spoiler alert -- if you haven't read this book, and want to, you might want to stop reading at this point, as it has possible plot spoilers ***

The book never explains who the Old Ones are, but we are told that they have a lot of superpowers not accessible to ordinary people, and the young/old Will Stanton learns how to use these powers by instantly absorbing a magic book. And this is, I think, why I liked this story less than Over Sea, Under Stone. The children in that book, unlike Will Stanton, are ordinary children with no superpowers. As G.K. Chesterton puts it, in his book Orthodoxy:

...oddities only strike ordinary people. Oddities do not strike odd people. This is why ordinary people have a much more exciting time; while odd people are always complaining of the dulness of life. This is also why the new novels die so quickly, and why the old fairy tales endure for ever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal. But in the modern psychological novel the hero is abnormal; the centre is not central. Hence the fiercest adventures fail to affect him adequately, and the book is monotonous. You can make a story out of a hero among dragons; but not out of a dragon among dragons. The fairy tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad world. The sober realistic novel of to-day discusses what an essential lunatic will do in a dull world.

Will Stanton, however

... wondered how to explain to an elder brother that an eleven-year-old was no longer quite an eleven-year-old, but a creature subtly different from the human race, fighting for its survival

That makes Will Stanton seem like something out of The Midwich Cuckoos other than being on the side of the good guys. It cuts him off from normal human relations with his family, but not for normal human reasons, but rather for inhuman ones.

The reviewer of my book also detected the influence of Charles Williams, whose novels I have read, and whose influence I freely acknowledge. Interestingly enough The Dark is Rising has several scenes which are reminiscent of Charles Williams's novel The Greater Trumps. In both books the family goes to church on Christmas day for Anglican Mattins, and on the way home rescue a homeless wanderer from a snowstorm which turns into a supernatural blizzard. The difference is that in The Greater Trumps the characters are normal human beings, though they do have access to magical objects. In The Dark is Rising, however, there is a deus ex machina in almost every chapter, and sometimes more than one.

At one point Will Stanton does face a moral choice where his decision could make a difference, when the bad guys have kidnapped his sister Mary, and they threaten to kill her if he does not hand over the signs he has gathered. He refusesw, but Mary is in no real danger, because she is rescued by a deus ex machina.

I did enjoy reading the book, but I don't think it was as good as the first one.

And then, going beyond simply reviewing this book, I come to the comparison with my own. If there were some things I didn't much like about this book, how did I do it differently (or try to -- it is for the reader to judge whether I succeeded) in my books?

In my children's book Of Wheels and Witches and its sequel The Enchanted Grove the child characters are normal human beings, with no superpowers. Some of their opponents are human, and some have magical or supernatural powers, so there is a fantasy element in the books, but I have tried to give the children moral agency, so that their choices do make a difference, and do have consequences, some of which could be foreseen and others not. But as I said, it's up to the reader to judge how well I succeeded.

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The Madonna of Excelsior

The Madonna Of Excelsior by Zakes Mda
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A novel that has a little bit of everything, almost -- a sex scandal, sibling rivalry, political chicanery, and believable characters. And so much of it is true, I read it in the newspaper 50 years ago.

It is set in a real small town in the Free State province of South Africa, and is based on real events, so the usual disclaimer about the characters not resembling any real persons, living or dead, is somewhat differently worded. Though the events are a matter of public record, the characters are fictitious. I've written a few books set in a small South African town, but having lived in a small town myself, I didn't dare to use a  real town as the setting, but Zakes Mda boldly does so, and his book is all the more realistic as a result.

But the fictitious characters do resemble real people. And the book gives a microcosm of South Africa in the last three decades of the 20th century. Excelsior is a real town, and it really was rocked by a sex scandal in the early 1970s. The neighbouring towns, mentioned in the book, are real and I have been to, or through some of them.

And at least one of the characters is real, Father Frans Claerhout, a Roman Catholic and artist who lived at Tweespruit just south of Excelsior, and descriptions of whose paintings at the beginning of each chapter form a linking motif for the story.

Popi Pule has two half-brothers; one, Viliki Pule, is black, and the other, Tjaart Cronje, is white, and all three were born in apartheid South Africa, much of whose legislation was calculated to prevent precisely those kinds of relationships. Viliki and Puke's mother Niki had been Tjaart's nanny when he was small, and she is the eponymous Madonna of Excelsior, and had been a model for some of Father Frans Claerhout's paintings.

People sometimes ask, what was South Africa like during apartheid, and during and after the end of apartheid, and in this book Zakes Mda nails it. He tells it like it is, and was. He has written several books set in South Africa, and each of the ones I've read gives an accurate picture of some or other aspect of South African life. There are links to some of my reviews of them here,

If but someone from another country was coming to South Africa from another country, and wanted an introduction to South African life, and history, and social relations, this is the book I would recommend to them. Since it is fiction, it doesn't have all the facts, but it does tell the truth about South Africa, the unvarnished truth. If you want to know what South Africa is really like, read this book!

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