PLACE OF REEDS
A True African Love Story
by Caitlin Davies
Pocket Books, £7.99
Raised in London, Caitlin Davies went to university in the United States. There she met a man named Ron, from Botswana. When he went home, she went with him. In a small town called Maun, she taught and then became a freelance journalist. She and Ron married, and had a daughter named Ruby. Then Davies was raped. Ancient antipathies arose, and eventually — painfully — Davies moved back to London with Ruby, where both now live.
This is an account of those 12 years. The title calls to Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa and sets our expectations. We know Botswana, or think we know it, from Alexander McCall Smith’s wonderful, light novels set there. But this is a different story. Davies’s Botswana is a country of violence, endemic Aids and social disintegration. Her horrific rape has more to do with J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace than with McCall Smith’s lady detective.
But the book is at least a third too long, and is marred by Davies’s credulity: “I sat stiffly in the Land Rover, silenced by the idea that I was now travelling in a place where an animal could kill me.” That aside, we get a real sense of how people live in Botswana, rather than how we think they ought to. Davies writes bravely of her experiences, particularly her appalling rape, and raises important issues about sexuality, justice, development and politics. But apart from Ruby, love has little to do with it. Seldom has a sub-title been more wrong.
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IN THE DARK ROOM
A Journey in Memory
by Brian Dillon
Penguin, £8.99
Even in the long litany of unhappy Catholic childhoods, Brian Dillon’s stands out. He tells in this memoir of how his mother died slowly and horribly from scleroderma, the progressive hardening of the skin. “The lungs are subject to a stealthy fibrosis, so that the patient is exhausted and breathless after the slightest exertion.” His father is a minor Irish civil servant, repressed, laconic and withdrawn. Dillon and his two brothers pass their days in oppressive silence in the family home in a Dublin suburb. The house’s exterior pebble dash is “a kind of grey, but a grey so lifeless it barely registers on the retina . . .”
But what sets this apart is the method by which Dillon tells of the death first of his mother, in 1985, then of his father and then, eventually, of selling the house. He weaves into these facts reflections on the changeable nature of memory. The rooms of his home become a mnemonic for the suffering that took place there. References to history, art, literature and films give further structure to a book that is almost unbearably intimate.
Some will find this book over-ambitious, and question whether Dillon succeeds in moving beyond the particular to elucidating our common human condition. We feel his family’s pain. Does this translate into pathos? Others will admire the candour of his account, and the disciplined technique by which it is delivered. Whatever your view, this is a book that lingers in the mind long after it is finished.
THE TERROR
Civil War in the French Revolution
by David Andress
Abacus, £9.99
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When the French Revolution was over, “the world was a different place. The map of Europe was no longer drawn to suit the competing dynastic ambitions of ancient monarchical houses”. What it and the American Revolution have meant for us, perhaps more lastingly, is the universal belief today in individual liberty. The consumer-citizen is king. Corresponding difficulties, whether global warming or war in Iraq, do not detain most of us for very long.
This account of the French Revolution is the first of any substance since Simon Schama’s Citizens, and therefore most welcome. Even if one wants more understanding of the principal protagonists such as Danton or Robespierre, Andress has produced a scholarly yet accessible book. Structured chronologically, not thematically, the book is refreshingly old-fashioned and has an excellent glossary, notes and index. Andress’s prose is crisp and clear, if a little over fond of weary metaphors such as “the clock would not be turned back”.
His central concern is a paradox. The Revolution was meant to overthrow tyranny but produced its own. Andress gives a gripping account of how the Terror and the guillotine came to be part of what was, in effect, a post-revolutionary civil war. He succeeds in the historian’s primary purpose and proves the pertinence of Faulkner’s dictum that “the past is not dead. It isn’t even past.” As we detain those suspected of terrorism or fight on in Iraq, the past is all too present.