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Embrace

Mark Behr

3.86 · Rating details · 83 ratings · 5 reviews

Embrace is the story of the awakening of Karl De Man, a thirteen-year-old student at the Berg, an exclusive academy for boys in South Africa in the 1970s. The events of Karl's school life are interwoven with memories from his childhood and first years at the Berg, as he falls in love with both his best friend and his choirmaster. ...more

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Paperback, 726 pages

Published February 1st 2001 by Little, Brown Book Group

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Oct 24, 2017 Ingrid Turner rated it really liked it

This was well written, although I felt like this novel could have been two books: one a memoir of a childhood in South Africa and one about Karl's sexual awakening. I found 'The Smell of Apples' fascinating, so was looking forward to 'Embrace' although the length put me off for a while. I enjoyed reading a novel set in areas familiar to me growing up: Maritzburg, Matubatuba, Mfolozi, Charters, St Lucia etc. This novel gives an interesting account of what it was like to grow up in South Africa in ...more

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Apr 16, 2014 Philipc rated it liked it

Three stars means I liked the book. But I don't like Mark Behr. I'll get to that.

The blurb at the top of this pager gives a pretty good background to the story: pre-adolescent/adolescent boy growing up in South Africa under apartheid, coming to terms with his gay-ness in a deeply repressive society. Good strong subject. The psychology is convincing, the picture of South African society likewise, the prose fluent and even poetic.

Yet it failed to quite convince me. It read, far too often, like a ...more

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Mar 13, 2017 Stephen Hayes rated it liked it

Shelves: fiction-general, tshwane-library

A book about a 13-year-old boy in Standard 6 (Grade 8) in the Drakensberg Boys Choir School.

It's a long book (over 700 pages) and written partly in "stream of consciousness" style. It follows Karl De Man though his school year, but it also jumps back to his memories of earlier events in his life, from his earliest childhood.

The novel is semi-autobiographical, as the protagonist, like Behr himself, was born in Tanganyika (before it united with Zanzibar to become the United Republic of Tanzania). A book about a 13-year-old boy in Standard 6 (Grade 8) in the Drakensberg Boys Choir School.

It's a long book (over 700 pages) and written partly in "stream of consciousness" style. It follows Karl De Man though his school year, but it also jumps back to his memories of earlier events in his life, from his earliest childhood.

The novel is semi-autobiographical, as the protagonist, like Behr himself, was born in Tanganyika (before it united with Zanzibar to become the United Republic of Tanzania). When he was 2 years old the family moved to South Africa where his father became a game ranger for the Natal Parks Board, and he then attended the Drakensberg Boys Choir School from the age of 11. The main period covered by the book is his third year at the school, when he develops a crush on one of the teachers and also on a fellow pupil, as well as a girlfriend whom he sees in the holidays, who is two years older than him.

Another teacher recognises his ability in art and writing, but his macho father wants him to ignore his talents and prepare for a more lucrative career, even if it is in fields that don't really interest him. So a lot of the book deals with teenage angst, and probably quite authentically, since it is based on the author's personal experience.

The chronology is at times confusing, as the "present" moves through his year at school, but there are conversations in which he refers to previous events in his life, which he later recalls in stream of consciousness fashion. He also tries to sort out what are genuine memories, and what he has been told by others, and he becomes quite lyical in his descriptions of the Mfolozi, Hluhluwe and Mkuzi game reserves where he lived until the age of about 7.

I found that in some parts the book, like Frankie and Stankie, was evocative of my own childhood and life. Both books mentioned not only childhood experieves that were similar to mine, but also people whom I had met in real life, though not as a child.

At one point he writes of shooting mousebirds with an air rifle, and I remember doing that, standing in our paddock, and shooting at mousebirds in the almond trees. I was with someone else, I forget who, and my mother stormed out, very angry, and said she would confiscate my air rifle if she ever caught me shooting birds again.

Another similar childhood experience was when he was riding a horse behind another, which kicked him, and he had to have stitches in his knee. I recalled being kicked by pony Tom, on the sole of my foot, in similar circumstances. I could recall the cold and the wet and my bare feet in the stirrups, my wet jeans, my wet shirt clinging to me, and down below the Jukskei River, flowing through Lyndhurst. I thought he had kicked me on the knee too, but perhaps that was another occasion, and I remember my knee being bruised and swollen, though not so that I needed stitches.

There were also considerable differences, however. Mark Behr describes the racist and white supremacist views of many of the pupils and teachers at the Drakensberg Boys Choir School in the 1970s. It was a private fee-paying school, and therefore under no obligations to give the National Party indoctrination that went on in government schools, but apparently it did. When I was the protagonist's age I attended St Stithian's College in the 1950s, and I don't recall such racist attitudes among the teachers at all, and relatively rarely among the pupils.

Another thing that struck me, which has nothing to do with the content, was that the publishers (Abacus) had obviously paid no heed to the adage "Putt knot yore trussed in spell chequers." The book really could have made use of a human editor, but was apparently produced by an el-cheapo publisher who tried to save money by dispensing with their services and relying on a semi-literate typist using a spelling checker. Among the numerous errors were "in cohort with" where "in cahoots with" was obviously intended, and "pallet" instead of "palate".

A somewhat expanded version of this review is on my blog here.
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Jun 29, 2008 Siria rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 21st-century, queer-lit, south-african-fiction

Embrace is an incredibly vivid and enthralling novel, for all that its subject matter sometimes makes it difficult to read. It follows Karl, a young boy in South Africa in the 1970s, as he slowly becomes aware of not just his own sexuality, but also of the racial tensions in the world around him. Tightly constructed, it builds to a very tense conclusion that left me breathless.

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