“The
Inn at Helsvlakte” is a creative tour de force. (Review by Moira Lovell,
courtesy of The Witness)
The
Inn at Helsvlakte is testimony to the singular
imagination and meticulous craftsmanship of South African novelist, poet and
anthologist, Patricia Schonstein. In its scope and detail, this, her seventh
novel, is, quite simply, breathtaking.
In a reimagined nineteenth century South
Africa, hostilities, begun some three generations before between the State and
the Separatists, continue. The demands of the Separatists, khaki-clad and
employing guerrilla tactics, are that the country should be divided, providing
them with the Eastern Territories.
In an unprecedented move, a group of
Separatists, mysteriously equipped with improved weaponry and kit, stages an
ambush in the stark area of Helsvlakte, near Jonker’s Inn. A detachment of
red-jacketed State soldiers, under the leadership of the renowned Captain
Leander Malan, is annihilated, though the Captain himself, seriously wounded
and facially disfigured, survives. So, too, does the military pastor, Lukas
Grobler, who emerges from the carnage with his faith seriously shaken.
These men subsequently become permanent
residents at Jonker’s Inn, which is situated on the Great North Road, four days
ride from the Capital. They join Ariel Liebowitz, a former librarian who, a
year before the Helsvlakte Ambush, relocated to the Inn following the devastating
destruction of the State Library in the Capital by the authorities. A fourth
individual, the eccentric William Blythe Morris, permanently unhinged after
seeing the slaughtered men and beasts at Helsvlakte, also takes up residence.
The Inn is run by the hard-drinking,
uncultivated Jakob Jonker, a number of servants, descendants of
hunter-gatherers who formerly inhabited the area, and Katinka (Kitty) Cloete, a
woman with numerous practical skills and a considerable range of talents, who
is officially married to Jonker but has no intimacy with him. He has a lover;
she has a past.
Katinka was raised at Cloete’s Halt, to the
south of Jonker’s Inn, under the tyranny of a hypocritical father whose
duplicity and lies damage her happiness and contribute significantly to the
tragedy at the climax of the novel.
A player in that tragedy is the young Rigal
van der Stel, who, having witnessed, at the age of twelve, the brutal killing
of his family at the hands of drunken State soldiers, determines to seek
revenge. He fixates on the person of Captain Leander Malan, the leader broken
by the Helsvlakte Ambush, as the target of his vengeance and makes his way
along the Great North Road to locate him at Jonker’s Inn.
The Helsvlakte Ambush is a cataclysmic
event in a protracted civil war. It shocks and appals, altering the perceptions
of individuals to war in particular and to the meaning of life in general.
Leading up to and beyond this event, Schonstein assembles a large cast of characters
and develops a narrative that both intrigues and compels. The Inn at Helsvlakte
is a creative tour de force.
The
Inn at Helsvlakte is published in paperback by Penguin
Books. ISBN 9781485904168. Recommended Price R270. - Moira Lovell
Posts
