{"id":1361,"date":"2014-05-31T17:17:17","date_gmt":"2014-05-31T23:17:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=1361"},"modified":"2014-05-31T17:17:17","modified_gmt":"2014-05-31T23:17:17","slug":"malla-nunn-present-darkness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/malla-nunn-present-darkness\/","title":{"rendered":"Malla Nunn: Present Darkness"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"presentdarkness\"<\/a>I haven\u2019t read Malla Nunn since her first book, A Beautiful Place to Die,<\/i> a beautifully written novel.\u00a0 In that book she establishes her three central characters: Emmanuel Cooper, a white policeman; Shabalala, a Zulu policeman; and a Jewish doctor, Zweigman.\u00a0 The books are set in 1950\u2019s South Africa, which makes all of these relationships loaded.\u00a0 In the first book the heaviness of the connections almost overwhelm the story.\u00a0 In this novel, Nunn\u2019s fourth, the characters are established and comfortable and the story being told can run on its own steam.<\/p>\n

Cooper, like Charles Todd\u2019s Ian Rutledge, is a war veteran (in his case WWII) with the shade of a dead officer living inside his head, a gruff, take no prisoners Scot.\u00a0 Zweigman is a survivor of Nazi concentration camps; and Shabalala bears the weight of living as a black man in a country controlled by white men. \u00a0 Every connection, action and reaction in this novel is racially tinged, necessarily so.<\/p>\n

Basically Nunn is writing about a world that is out of balance.\u00a0 The white control of South Africa is so tight because the whites fear what will happen if they let up; the natural tendencies of human beings are not considered in the way the South African government tries to control race, boundaries, both geographical and otherwise, and behavior.\u00a0 Cooper lives a secret life with a mixed race mistress who has borne his child, violating many white taboos.<\/p>\n

The story Nunn tells in this book is a gripping one:\u00a0 a white couple is discovered beaten to within an inch of their lives and their teenage daughter names Shabalala\u2019s son as the culprit.\u00a0 A remarkable amount of convenient evidence turns up making the case against the young man seemingly airtight; Cooper doesn\u2019t buy it and he and Shabalala are on their own quest to prove the youth\u2019s innocence.\u00a0 The daughter has been whisked away and the son isn\u2019t talking or providing himself with an alibi.<\/p>\n

The connections of the story threads in this novel are deep and brutal; but so was the reality Nunn is writing about.\u00a0 She describes the different parts of South Africa \u2013 Johannesburg, the shadow ghetto city and the countryside vividly and also makes clear that none of these parts interface.\u00a0 They all operate more or less as their own country, a true world out of balance where none of the parts relate to the other parts and understanding of any \u201cother\u201d is non-existent.<\/p>\n

It makes solving a crime doubly difficult and any evidence Cooper and his little gang of three uncover has to be ironclad to stand up as evidence and free Shabalala\u2019s son.\u00a0 In true mystery tradition Cooper operates as an absolute outsider; his special skills, apart from smarts and being able to take a beating, are his choice of friends and a natural gentleness that actually serves him surprisingly well.<\/p>\n

This is also a terrific crime story, not just a portrait of a difficult and brutal time in history.\u00a0 When all the threads of the story are at last woven together, the resolution seems a natural one.\u00a0 When Shabalala tells Cooper they must \u201cwash before going back to the world of ordinary things,\u201d it seems Nunn has brought a bit of balance to this part of her story at least.\u00a0 This is a wonderful, thoughtful, beautifully written book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I haven\u2019t read Malla Nunn since her first book, A Beautiful Place to Die, a beautifully written novel.\u00a0 In that book she establishes her three central characters: Emmanuel Cooper, a white policeman; Shabalala, a Zulu policeman; and a Jewish doctor, Zweigman.\u00a0 The books are set in 1950\u2019s South Africa, which makes all of these relationships … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[11],"class_list":["post-1361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1361"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1361\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1363,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1361\/revisions\/1363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}