I enjoyed reading your tale. In the end its structure became surprisingly dreamlike: a kind of many-worlds theory meets Groundhog Day.

What is culture, what are arbitrary borders, what is meant by a decision to take initial steps on a journey? Are these just devices alluding to some deeper level of impulse, fate or sensibility? The song Crocodile Shoes keeps going round in my head now for some reason...
Mike Ralph

I recently met David in the “Comments” section of an Internet site. We hit it off immediately and he sent me a link to his book and asked if I would, could I review it. I had a quick look at it and to oblige a new friend, and since I could identify with the subject material, I agreed. Having picked up a degree in English Literature from the University of Cape Town in my late teens and early twenties, it wouldn’t be a big deal. I was born in Bulawayo, when it was still in Southern Rhodesia, and have subsequently lived in Southern Africa most of my life: Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, Northern Rhodesia/Zambia, South West Africa/Namibia, Lesotho and South Africa, where I am now retired. I’ve seen the regimes come and go. I know the places and the people.

While small, compared to the errors made by the characters in David’s book, I soon found that in thinking reviewing the book would be easy, it would be an error. Reviewing it has been almost as difficult as has been reading it! If you read on you will see that this is not a criticism. Put simplistically, his book is about a White Englishman who has romantic liaisons with two South African Black women. Both result in marriage, one in divorce. In the telling of the story we are given rich insights into many things, many remarkable, like a White man’s experience of being smuggled into South Africa like a Black refugee. Or, any man’s experience, with muti (magical African medicine) involved. Also, what it is like to be a White man in an African township in South Africa. Also, the many lessons learned, some politically incorrect, like the tendency of Africans to take advantage of each other and, more particularly, of naive liberal Europeans. We get insights into the demise of Rhodesia and the Home Affairs Department of the “Rainbow Nation” of South Africa, and much more.

Perhaps the richness of the content causes the difficulty in reading. How do you say all of these things in one small book? I’m not sure David was consciously aware of the problem. Perhaps he was. Anyway, David uses some techniques that are novel, novel to me anyway – telling the story from one person’s perspective and then from another’s intermittently, switching paragraph to paragraph, without notice. Until you have worked it out it is confusing but, when you have, it is effective. Then, there are different versions of events, perhaps similar to Fowles’s French Lieutenant’s Woman, that you only learn towards the end.

When is all said and done, is this a book worth reading? Definitely YES! David writes well, with typically English self-effacing style and humour about circumstances you will find nowhere else. However, it is best to schedule at least two readings - the first to familiarise yourself with the content (which is unique) and the style and, the second, to unearth the small treasures that David has buried all over this small book! I won’t tell you about them so as not to diminish your delight when you find them for yourself.
Ian Olds