I had a slow start with this book, I think because of the framing narrator, but Ben de Toit's story hooked me right in after 50 pages or so. The slow I had a slow start with this book, I think because of the framing narrator, but Ben de Toit's story hooked me right in after 50 pages or so. The slow burn of his struggle for justice after the death of a black friend and colleague Gordon Ngubene in police custody is gut-wrenching and painful, but at the same time redemptive. Of all the books I have read recently about Apartheid South Africa (from a white perspective) Brink is the most successful in articulating the impossibility of white individuals 'helping' to improve the situation, and also the impossibility of not doing 'something'. The weighty guilt of white privilege is always with Ben and yet inaction is not an option. By the end I had also come to appreciate the framing narrator - a rather arrogant, uninspiring novelist himself - as a device. I'll certainly be interested to read more Brink on this evidence. ...more
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