PURGATORY ROAD

Fast-moving and well-written tale covers one man’s desperate need to escape a violent action of his past. (Review by Caroline Smart)

In Purgatory Road, Peter J Earle tells a fast-moving and well-written tale about a stock feeds sales representative who makes a major error of judgement – well, two actually. Goaded beyond endurance by two crooked traffic officers while driving back to his farm on a lonely road late at night, John Stafford shoots them and then disposes of their bodies in what he considers to be a fail-safe solution to the discovery of his deed.

However, said “fail-safe” solution comes back to haunt him again and again as he tries to keep his life on track. His emotions are flung further awry when his wife leaves him.

An indoctrinated South African of the time living in South Africa under apartheid rule, serving in the South African Defence Force in Angola had been the highlight of his life. So the struggle for independence in what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) beckoned, working on the assumption that the continued stability of his country and Rhodesia was worth fighting - or dying - for. If he gets caught for his double murder, he is doomed to die in any case.

Fuelled by many bottles of beer, and filled with loneliness and despair, he decides to adopt a different persona and leave South Africa. He has no relatives save one who has fortuitously shown no desire to leave the boundaries of the country, hence no need to apply for a passport in the immediate future.

The description of how he calmly and methodically manoeuvres his death and disappearance makes for fascinating reading. As he is on the verge of putting the plan in action, his wife returns to revive their relationship.

Escaping his own violent actions, he ends up in another kind of violence as he enters the 13th year of siege of the freedom struggle in Rhodesia. However, he forgets to include in his well-laid plans the continued existence of two people: aforesaid cousin and Sergeant Ludi Prinsloo. Not to mention an attractive Australian diver with whom he had a relationship prior to his “departure”.

The frontispiece of the book indicates that at boarding school after lights out, Peter J Earle was telling stories before he could write. A visionary English teacher then gave him permission to write stories instead of school articles as did the rest of the class. During his national service as a seaman in the South African Navy, he kept a notebook under his belt and wrote stories in the meal queue or lying on a torpedo at action stations. His life experience is varied – apart from being a stock feed salesman himself - and much involved in farm management and construction. He has been in prison in Zambia, owned a boat on the Okavango Delta, hunted big game, sung in a band and has over 60 parachute jumps to his credit.

All this experience comes out in his writing and I particularly enjoyed his descriptions of the terrains in which the book is set. The reader is easily transported to dusty rocky outcrops or marine depths.

Purgatory Road is published by PJE Publishing and retails at R149. It is available from the author on www.peterjearle.com ISDN 978-0-620-42292-5 – Caroline Smart