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readerstephen86's review
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.75
My favourite novel I have yet read that deals with issues of race relations in apartheid South Africa, after first being left somewhat cold by Nadine Gordimer's 'The Conservationist', and then successively more fully enjoying JM Coetzee's 'The Life and Times of Michael K' and Doris Lessing's 'The Grass is Singing'. Like the latter, Brink's novel gives us a double bind of race/gender, to explore questions of opporession, power, and self-empowerment. More broadly, 'An Instant in the Wind' offers a wider-lens on survival and mutual interdependence in the context if the inhospitable, windy, arid and often blood-soaked wild hinterlands beyond the Cape. Unlike Gordimer or (more enjoyably) Lessing's books, I cared for the characters. Elizabeth and Adam argue and sulk with each other, but at all points on the later journey over mountains and through the parched plains I could feel (and in the many erotic moments, quite graphically visualise) their love. More simply too, therefore, it is a romance.
The genius of Brink's writing is to eschew paragraphs that limit action to only one moment,and instead to frequentlt switch instantaneously between present-moment dialogue to past remembrances, without diajuncture or interruption to the flow of the narrative. Just as we all daydream, so the novel transports us through memories and conjectures, before returning us to the here-and-now. The troubling molestations of an uncle and the trauma of a brutal salt-laced lashing come as mental vistas that help us understand Elizabeth and Adam, without ever having to fully leave the treck, and all its privations, worries and hopes for the future.
Given that this book deals with slavery, estrangement, sexual abuse, and nature bearing its reddest tooth and claws, the wonder was that Brink could create such a hopeful and positive book. 'An Instant in the Wind' is a powerful document of early 1970s South African apartheid (written 1973 to 1975), just as much as it is a historical fiction set in the 1750s. Beyond Gordimer and Lessing, the other book I'd compare this to is Thomas Kenneally's 'The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith'. Of those books I've read, Kenneally's and Brink's both use historical pretexts to explore sociological issues around white privilege and psychological/philosophical issues of self-determination, with characters that I keenly wanted to win-out. The joy in Brink's case is that we are not left with a message of fatalism.
The genius of Brink's writing is to eschew paragraphs that limit action to only one moment,and instead to frequentlt switch instantaneously between present-moment dialogue to past remembrances, without diajuncture or interruption to the flow of the narrative. Just as we all daydream, so the novel transports us through memories and conjectures, before returning us to the here-and-now. The troubling molestations of an uncle and the trauma of a brutal salt-laced lashing come as mental vistas that help us understand Elizabeth and Adam, without ever having to fully leave the treck, and all its privations, worries and hopes for the future.
Given that this book deals with slavery, estrangement, sexual abuse, and nature bearing its reddest tooth and claws, the wonder was that Brink could create such a hopeful and positive book. 'An Instant in the Wind' is a powerful document of early 1970s South African apartheid (written 1973 to 1975), just as much as it is a historical fiction set in the 1750s. Beyond Gordimer and Lessing, the other book I'd compare this to is Thomas Kenneally's 'The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith'. Of those books I've read, Kenneally's and Brink's both use historical pretexts to explore sociological issues around white privilege and psychological/philosophical issues of self-determination, with characters that I keenly wanted to win-out. The joy in Brink's case is that we are not left with a message of fatalism.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Abortion, Animal cruelty, Child abuse, Child death, Racism, and Slavery
Minor: Blood
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