Like Water in Wild Places Book

Bastiaan stood small before me, his skin creased and folded into the soft deep baby courses of old age. He wore an apron of springbok skin flashed white in the front and rust red at the sides. His shoulder blades poked out sharp through the woody skin of his back. At his neck, elbows and knees, the skin pouched into what looked like lappings of well-worn leather. Bastiaan is the old Bushman "given" to 12-year-old Conrad by his father, Afrikaner Jack Hartmann, on the young boy's first hunting trip. It is on this far from jolly jaunt that we are given our first glimpse of Hartmann's patriarchal brutality, a verbal and physical savagery that leads to Conrad's mother's suicide and to his sister Beeky's fearful defiance of her father. Pamela Jooste is one of the prize-winning scribes of Africa--her first novel, Dance with a Poor Man's Daughter won the Commonwealth Best First Book Award for the Africa Region. This, her third, as with her previous two has its domestic political element, for Conrad joins the South African army fighting on the Namibian borders while his friend, Jerome, is a bomb maker in the government's dirty tricks department. There is much of stirring Bushman legend displaying the role of that tribes' ancestors, the powerful plot runs with honey, races with eland--the almighty antelope, with trance dances, drylands and thunderous rains. And we backtrack through Afrikaner history through the delightful device of the Hartmann great-granny ghost--the Old Madam. Pamela Jooste writes a strong story with a steady voice. --Gorry Bowes TaylorRead More