TOP 10 SOUTH AFRICAN NOVELS
On 11 June 2010 by AdminThe Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner First published in 1883, this depiction of life on an isolated farm in the Karoo is remarkable not only for the beauty of its descriptive writing, but for the radical and feminist ideas expressed by its free-spirited heroine, Lyndall. Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
FIFA World Cup 2010 – South Africa
On 7 June 2010 by AdminWith only a few days to go before the FIFA World Cup opens in Cape Town, South Africa is back in the news – and for reasons (generally) more positive than hitherto. Instead of the stories – all too familiar in recent years – of corruption, ANC infighting, and escalating street crime, there are heartening
Literary models for The Dark Tower
On 4 May 2010 by AdminWriting The Dark Tower necessitated a good deal of historical research – not all of which was factual. Novels, such as The American by Henry James, The Duke’s Children by Anthony Trollope, A Pair of Blue Eyes and The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy, The Egoist by Meredith – all of which were
The quest for Isandhlwana
On 15 April 2010 by AdminIf the starting-point for The Dark Tower was a few handwritten pages in a long-dead woman’s diary for 1879, the process of writing the novel brought in many other elements. There was the fact that the story was set at a particular time in history; that it was set in a country I had not at that time visited; and that it was about war. All these facts, I knew, would involve me in a good deal of research, both of the kind that involves sitting in libraries, and the kind that’s about going to see for oneself. It wasn’t the first time I’d done such research – a previous novel Fabulous Time, part of which is set in Shanghai in 1911, had necessitated a visit to China – but it was the most sustained and ambitious work of its kind I’d so far attempted.
Isandhlwana – The Dark Tower
On 19 March 2010 by AdminIsandhlwana is a disturbing place. Even if one knows nothing of the grim events enacted here, a little over 130 years ago, it still leaves a powerful impression – with its barren outcrops of low hills, surrounding a grassy plain, seamed with dry river-beds, and with the squat, tower-like shape of the mountain, from which it takes its name, looming overhead. It is the landscape evoked, with eerie prescience, by Robert Browning, in his 1855 poem, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’, which supplied me with the title, and epigraph, for my novel, The Dark Tower.