A little dissapointed, 27 Jul 2007
I was really looking forward to this book, also based on the positive reviews, but found it quite tough going. The story is definitely an interesting and compelling one, but it just didn't keep me interested. I don't like to give up too soon, so kept trying, but all in all I put it aside in favour of another new book about 5 times. It is definitely well written and researched, but feels more like a biography than a novel.
An inspiring book, 07 Jul 2006
I have just finished reading Ice Road, and it still fills my head and heart. Slovo writes with compassion of a period in Russian history which brought about so much human suffering. THis is a book that reveals humanity at its worst and at its best, yet Slovo never judges. She lets her characters speak for themselves. Wonderful.
Compelling Writing, 27 Jul 2004
Gillian Slovo is consitently compelling - her autobiographical work Every Secret Thing remains one of my all-time favourite books. This is assured, sweeping and interesting (and also a change from her African books) - only one thing jarred a little, which is the eloquence of the narrator who describes herself as barely literate and uneducated which doesn't quite square with such fluid first-person prose.
Ice Road, 23 May 2004
This was a book that I could just not put down, and when I finished I wanted to start all over again... but I had to go to work. Gillian Slovo's book is a realistic novel about true events in Russia's history and whoever you are, it will make you shed tears. I didn't want to read it at first because I thought it was going to be a cliché romantic drama with shooting and death. Thankfully my friend convinced me to go ahead and after page two I saw just how wrong I really was. I won't go into the story line as I wouldn't want to spoil it for anyone. However trust me when I say this is a book you just have to read.
Why Ice Road should win the Orange Prize, 23 May 2004
ICE ROAD
by
Gillian Slovo
A review by Valerie Rowland
Slovo brings scholarship and accomplished writing to this powerful tale of revolution, political idealism and disillusionment. Slovo's ice, snow and blizzards whirl through the pages, carrying the drama along; a counterpoint to the suffering of ordinary people caught up in the tragedy of war, betrayal and privation.
There is an obvious connection between Slovo's upbringing in South Africa, the daughter of anti-apartheid campaigners and her bold first attempt at a historical novel set in Stalinist Russia, a comparable period in history in which ordinary people struggled to survive repression and revolution. The child Gillian's observation of life around her informs the narrative of Ice Road. Left alone to be «the responsible one» of her siblings Gillian knew the African servants as individuals and personalities. She understood what anyone who has worked as a domestic knows; that the detritus of the household is the key to its characters. To clean a bedroom is to know the intimate secrets of its occupants. Irina, the central character of Ice Road is a cleaner, who observes people and events with a dispassionate eye.
The «I» of Irina and the «I» echoed in the title are the «eyes» of an observant child and the key to the warmth of humanity in this book. Irina comes to learn that there are terrible consequences when people are sacrificed on the altar of idealism.
Ice Road is a celebration of the female spirit finding a path through the blizzards of history. It deserves the Orange Prize.
The New South Africa struggling to emerge., 28 Oct 2008
Sarah receives a phonecall in New York from her mentor Ben, a call that will bring her back the dorpie in South Africa that she left. The Truth Commission has arrived in town and the school Headmaster would like to use it to find out what happened to his son, to finally have a body to bury.
The New South Africa still trying to come to terms with its past, the victims and the perpetrators are caught up by a connection that none can break. This is a good book to try and understand what is happening even now in RSA, noone was unaffected by the past.
Truth? Reconciliation?, 28 Feb 2006
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was set up in post-apartheid South Africa, enabled people who had been imprisoned for the crimes they had committed in apartheid times to secure an amnesty, provided they told the full truth about their activities to a court set up by the commission, presided over by judges and with perpetrators and victims represented by lawyers. This novel deals with one such case in a dusty little town called Smitsrivier.
Dirk Hendricks, a former policeman now imprisoned, had applied for amnesty in respect of his having severely tortured Alex Mpondo, now a member of Parliament. The powerful middle section of the novel is about the hearing of his case by the Commission. The tense confrontation between Hendricks and Mpondo in court is painful in the extreme. The burly Hendricks, who has been well-briefed by his lawyers and is in any case very familiar with court proceedings, who knows all about psychological weaknesses and is a shrewd actor to boot, is determined to conceal the full truth. Mpondo has for some years tried to bury the memories of what he has suffered, but now they surface and cripple him. Moreover, he is also crippled by something else (which I must not reveal in this review) which both he and Hendricks know but which Mpondo’s constituents do not. There is also the undercurrent that the two men are bound to each other by a terrible kind of intimacy.
Closely interwoven with the Hendricks-Mpondo relationship is that between Pieter Muller, another ex-policeman, and James Sizela, a black headmaster, desperate to find the remains of his son Stephen whom Muller had killed. While Mpondo and Sizela are very different characters, Hendricks and Muller are, from a fictional point of view, perhaps a little too much alike; and the key confrontation between Muller and Sizela, though it is as tense as that between Hendricks and Mpondo and as powerfully written, struck me as being rather closer to melodrama than to drama. And although the game of bluff and double bluff that is played at the end of the book can be seen as an ironic commentary on the word “truth” in the title of the Commission, it also subtly, but I think unintentionally, shifts the novel from a profound exploration of the psychology of torturer and victim to an altogether slicker level of story-telling. But despite these reservations, I found this book so gripping that I stick with a five star rating.
Lastly, a few words about Sarah Barcant, Mpondo’s lawyer. She had been born in Smitsrivier and had been trained there as a lawyer; but fourteen years ago, during the apartheid period, she had left for New York. One of the many excellent qualities of the book is her awareness of how much has changed in South Africa during her absence - and how much has not: in particular the eternal landscape of South Africa, its light and its scents, which are wonderfully conveyed. At the end the question is posed whether she had been a New York lawyer for so long that she never really understands what (in the author’s view, I think) the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was, and what it was not and could not be.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was set up in post-apartheid South Africa, enabled people who had been imprisoned for the crimes they had committed in apartheid times to secure an amnesty, provided they told the full truth about their activities to a court set up by the commission, presided over by judges and with perpetrators and victims represented by lawyers. This novel deals with one such case in a dusty little town called Smitsrivier.
Dirk Hendricks, a former policeman now imprisoned, had applied for amnesty in respect of his having severely tortured Alex Mpondo, now a member of Parliament. The powerful middle section of the novel is about the hearing of his case by the Commission. The tense confrontation between Hendricks and Mpondo in court is painful in the extreme. The burly Hendricks, who has been well-briefed by his lawyers and is in any case very familiar with court proceedings, who knows all about psychological weaknesses and is a shrewd actor to boot, is determined to conceal the full truth. Mpondo has for some years tried to bury the memories of what he has suffered, but now they surface and cripple him. Moreover, he is also crippled by something else (which I must not reveal in this review) which both he and Hendricks know but which Mpondo’s constituents do not. There is also the undercurrent that the two men are bound to each other by a terrible kind of intimacy.
Closely interwoven with the Hendricks-Mpondo relationship is that between Pieter Muller, another ex-policeman, and James Sizela, a black headmaster, desperate to find the remains of his son Stephen whom Muller had killed. While Mpondo and Sizela are very different characters, Hendricks and Muller are, from a fictional point of view, perhaps a little too much alike; and the key confrontation between Muller and Sizela, though it is as tense as that between Hendricks and Mpondo and as powerfully written, struck me as being rather closer to melodrama than to drama. And although the game of bluff and double bluff that is played at the end of the book can be seen as an ironic commentary on the word “truth” in the title of the Commission, it also subtly, but I think unintentionally, shifts the novel from a profound exploration of the psychology of torturer and victim to an altogether slicker level of story-telling. But despite these reservations, I found this book so gripping that I stick with a five star rating.
Lastly, a few words about Sarah Barcant, Mpondo’s lawyer. She had been born in Smitsrivier and had been trained there as a lawyer; but fourteen years ago, during the apartheid period, she had left for New York. One of the many excellent qualities of the book is her awareness of how much has changed in South Africa during her absence - and how much has not: in particular the eternal landscape of South Africa, its light and its scents, which are wonderfully conveyed. At the end the question is posed whether she had been a New York lawyer for so long that she never really understands what (in the author’s view, I think) the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was, and what it was not and could not be.
Truth? Reconciliation?, 09 Feb 2006
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was set up in post-apartheid South Africa, enabled people who had been imprisoned for the crimes they had committed in apartheid times to secure an amnesty, provided they told the full truth about their activities to a court set up by the commission, presided over by judges and with perpetrators and victims represented by lawyers. This novel deals with one such case in a dusty little town called Smitsrivier.
Dirk Hendricks, a former policeman now imprisoned, had applied for amnesty in respect of his having severely tortured Alex Mpondo, now a member of Parliament. The powerful middle section of the novel is about the hearing of his case by the Commission. The tense confrontation between Hendricks and Mpondo in court is painful in the extreme. The burly Hendricks, who has been well-briefed by his lawyers and is in any case very familiar with court proceedings, who knows all about psychological weaknesses and is a shrewd actor to boot, is determined to conceal the full truth. Mpondo has for some years tried to bury the memories of what he has suffered, but now they surface and cripple him. Moreover, he is also crippled by something else (which I must not reveal in this review) which both he and Hendricks know but which Mpondo’s constituents do not. There is also the undercurrent that the two men are bound to each other by a terrible kind of intimacy.
Closely interwoven with the Hendricks-Mpondo relationship is that between Pieter Muller, another ex-policeman, and James Sizela, a black headmaster, desperate to find the remains of his son Stephen whom Muller had killed. While Mpondo and Sizela are very different characters, Hendricks and Muller are, from a fictional point of view, perhaps a little too much alike; and the key confrontation between Muller and Sizela, though it is as tense as that between Hendricks and Mpondo and as powerfully written, struck me as being rather closer to melodrama than to drama. And although the game of bluff and double bluff that is played at the end of the book can be seen as an ironic commentary on the word “truth” in the title of the Commission, it also subtly, but I think unintentionally, shifts the novel from a profound exploration of the psychology of torturer and victim to an altogether slicker level of story-telling. But despite these reservations, I found this book so gripping that I stick with a five star rating.
Lastly, a few words about Sarah Barcant, Mpondo’s lawyer. She had been born in Smitsrivier and had been trained there as a lawyer; but fourteen years ago, during the apartheid period, she had left for New York. One of the many excellent qualities of the book is her awareness of how much has changed in South Africa during her absence - and how much has not: in particular the eternal landscape of South Africa, its light and its scents, which are wonderfully conveyed. At the end the question is posed whether she had been a New York lawyer for so long that she never really understands what (in the author’s view, I think) the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was, and what it was not and could not be.
Post Apartheid South Africa, 01 Mar 2005
Sarah Barcant is a successful young lawyer in New York who grew up in Smitrivier, South Africa. One day she gets a call from Ben Hoffman, a retired lawyer who used to be Sarah's professional mentor, asking her to come back to Smitrivier to take up a case. And so after fourteen years, Sarah returns to the town where she grew up to do Ben a favour because she thinks she owes him so much. A policeman, Pieter Muller, is suspected of having killed James Sizela's son Steve during the Apartheid. Muller's culpability has been a belief in Smitrivier for thirteen years, ever since Steve was arrested on Pieter Muller's orders and then disappeared. So now the Truth Commission is James's last chance to find his son's body and have him properly buried. The timing appears to be perfect since the Truth Commission is about to deal with the jailed policeman Dirk Hendricks who applied for amnesty for the torture of Alex Mpondo, now an MP in the South African government. The plan is to use Alex Mpondo's presence at the hearing to threaten Hendricks that unless he reveals Pieter Muller's complicity in the murder of Steve Sizela, he may not get his amnesty. But the search for the truth is going to be far more arduous than Sarah imagined - perhaps even an impossible task.
Mrs Slovo casts a merciless look at contemporary South Africa where heroism and perfidy are no longer distinct, where new truths are as painful as old lies, where torturers, once heroes, are now victims. An excellent novel which shows the absurd relationship between aggressors and victims and the power between the torturers and the tortured.
Good insight into the Truth and Reconciliation Council, 27 Feb 2002
As someone who spent sometime in South Africa in the last few years, I was interested to read some fiction about the Truth and Reconciliation hearings. This was a good start. The author describes the hearing from several points of view which gives an insight into the different expectations people have.
The descriptions of an African town were superb and it brought me back immediately to similar places that I visited.
