BOOK REVIEW

Reviewed by
SHERIDAN GRISWOLD | Friday November 9, 2007 00:00

Blind Faith is a political thriller straight out of South Africa's recent past. It spans the years 1989 to 1997. It is sophisticated, extremely well written and most entertaining. It is also a 'quick read' because it absorbs the reader and moves right along.

Elena de Villiers, in 1989, accidentally got caught up in the tentacles of the worst arms of the apartheid state by willingly assisting an escaped prisoner from Robben Island, Vulani Mwelo. This act of mercy, involvement and commitment, when others shy away, is what gives heart and depth to this novel. It is the gesture that came unasked that gave hope to her life.

Elena had gone for an evening run on the beach at Bloubergstrand and found a man washed up on a surfboard at the shoreline. It is getting dark and no one else is around.

She instinctively assists him.
He is wounded and weak from loss of blood, but she is able to hide the surfboard and get him to her artist's studio beneath and behind the house she lives in with her elderly and declining father. There she nurses Vulani back to health.

Elena has a job working as a graphic artist at the SABC, but her passion is painting to classical music with unusual brushes, paints and water from a kloof high in Desolation Valley in the Karoo outside Graaf Reinet, across the plains of Camdeboo, where she grew up and her father's family for four generations had a farm. Her mother was an artist who turned a room in their Karoo house into her canvass and as an expression of her sensitivities. Elena is famous in Cape Town for teaching art to students through music.

Elena's dedication to the Karoo as a source of inspiration had deep roots.
'They believed the Karoo calls forth special qualities of character. It made them seem heroic. Lone, vertical figures against the raw, savage, horizontal earth. It gave them a sense of power no city job could ever give, even when it led only to pain. It is like a magnetic field in the blood, this pull towards owning the land. It surges stronger than love for anything else. And it ends up in a dryness of the soul - if you allow enough droughts to make their mark' (page 138).

Vulani Mwelo has an unusual past, too. He was escaping from Robben Island because he had to see his mother, who had been shot and was in a hospital in the Eastern Cape. If he had not stepped on a bottle and cut his foot seriously and later gashed his head he probably would have made it without Elena's help. It is an unusual set of circumstances that landed Vulani in prison on the notorious island. He is a scientist with an impeccable background who was able to penetrate for the ANC one of the State's secret institutions designed to create new weapons of chemical warfare to be used against the opposition.

The 22 Med Corps outside Pretoria was run by Dr Leonard Bresler, an Afrikaner with strange ambitions who was using the state for his own purposes, but deeply involved in his research. Bresler enjoyed being at the centre and manipulating power. Yet, he could see the changes that were coming, and was careful to shred possible evidence that could be used against him. When the circumstances were right Vulani vanished from Pretoria with dangerous files that could expose Bresler. He was able to hide them and a decoy on a beach in the Eastern Cape and never revealed their whereabouts even after he was caught and incarcerated.

The novel opens in Oxford in 1997, where Elena has been living in exile for seven years.

Bresler, who bought her painting Debussy for a price twice what she had expected eased her out of South Africa. Unknown to her, all these years he has been keeping tabs on her. Now he has been hauled before the TRC. His picture is splashed across the front page of her newspaper. She had always thought that Vulani had been murdered by the police in 1989 when he tried to reach his contact in a location at Motherwell in the Eastern Cape and she had remained hidden in her car watching his progress. Her move into exile was partly motivated by this loss. In Oxford she slowly absorbed the significance of the news from home, but then she suddenly decided to return to Cape Town and find out what really happened over those fateful days in 1989. If it had not been, 'for Elena, for those nervous strong hands and her strange and fierce will to help him, he could have lost more important things; hope, and his hold on the power of good' (page 245).

The first two chapters in this novel are like a prologue, but instead are labelled Part one.

Part two covers 38 more chapters in which Elena is recounting to her Oxford boyfriend, Matthew Bishop, her perceptions of what happened in 1989 and why she left South Africa, and why she had to return now - even though he advised her against going back.

The last 11 chapters are a long epilogue recounting what happened on her return to Cape Town, her finding Vulani and her final confrontation with Dr Bresler when she goes to the Eastern Cape to find the missing files that will incriminate the good doctor (patterned on Dr Death?).

The excitement of reading a thriller like this lies in the discovery of the layers of complexity and interest as they are revealed and not knowing in advance much about it from a review. I have tried to provide only sufficient context to make you aware that this novel has amazing verisimilitude and flow and that it is worth reading.

Barbara Flscher worked for the SABC. She also left South Africa to live in Oxford, England, but after five years returned to South Africa. She was born in Pretoria and studied at Stellenbosch. As an award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker she was honoured by an invitation to be a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1997.  Her first published book is a collection of short stories, Reisgenoot (2002) that won the Eugene Marais Prize in 2003.

Blind Faith at first seems an odd title for a political thriller. There are at least eight other books using that title in one way or another. But perhaps the most famous use of Blind Faith goes back to August 1969 and Eric Clapton whose record Blind Faith was released then. It featured a naked pubescent 11-year-old girl and became the name of his band.

In this novel blind faith is first used to refer to what happens when naked bodies intertwine.Music painting is also not new. It stands out perhaps most graphically in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain (1924). This is a novel that is crying out to be made into a movie.
e-mail sheridangriswold@yahoo.com