Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful/: Waiting for the Barbarians
Callan, Edward
'How you get the truth' AH. BUT TOUR LAND IS BEAUTIFUL Alan Paton Scribners, $12.95, 271 pp. WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS J.M. Coetzee Penguin Books, $3.95, 156 pp. Edward Callan ON FEBRUARY...
...Joll, a dandified sadist, is convinced that torture best serves truth: "First I get lies, you see-this is what happens-first lies, then pressure, then more lies, then more pressure, then the break, then more pressure, then the truth...
...He appears to take his title from C.P...
...In time, the Treason Act, the Sabotage Act, and the Bureau of State Security Act known as BOSS, greatly extended the Minister's powers of detention without trial...
...Coetzee-born in 1940 into an Afrikaans-speaking family but later schooled on Joyce, Kafka, and Beckett (as well as Freud)-employs the subtle indirection of psychological allegory...
...His narrator is a self-indulgent patrician magistrate- I'homme moyen sensuel- in a small outpost of the Empire...
...He aids a tortured boy and takes in a barbarian girl crippled and nearly blinded by Joll's torturers in the presence of her father whom they killed...
...But in Paton's book one meets modern Christians of all sorts-some with the devouring propensities of coliseum lions...
...At first inclined to stand aloof, the magistrate is drawn to interfere...
...And as justice requires sanity, so sanity needs humor since the absurdities of irrational prejudice are frequently comic- as witness the grossly obscene anonymous letters signed "Proud White Christian Woman" in this book...
...This dilemma provides a subtle common theme in these two equally remarkable-though stylistically different-South African novels: Alan Paton's Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful and J.M...
...He survives, and when Joll's forces abandon the place, he assumes the care of a remnant of unprotected townspeople facing barbarian vengeance...
...Paton suffered through the events he writes of...
...for on February 27, 1982 the State Department lifted trade restrictions imposed on South Africa by President Carter...
...Edward Callan ON FEBRUARY 25, 1982, Dr...
...It begins with the launching of...
...There may be joy in every quarter because the land is beautiful...
...An elderly Hindu warns Prem Bodasingh...
...Van Onselen looks forward to "a Golden Age" when under Dr...
...Niel Aggett, a white physician turned union organizer, died while held incommunicado at John Vorster Square, the Johannesburg headquarters of South Africa's security police...
...He tells her, for example, that "any preaching of racial equality will in the future be regarded as an attempt to further the aims of Communism...
...That's how you get the truth...
...Paton, who will turn eighty next January, has recoverd from a recent bout with illness and hopes for continued health to complete his trilogy...
...Should he stand aloof, rebel, or do the best he can within the system to alleviate its harshness...
...The practice of detention or restriction without access to the courts began during the defiance campaign of 1952 when Chief Lutuli was "banned" under the provisions of the 1950 Suppression of Communism Act which empowered the Justice Minister, John Vorster, to restrict anyone who in his opinion "wittingly or unwittingly" furthered the aims of Communism...
...Vaguely uncertain of his motives, the magistrate begins a strange relationship with the girl that combines fatherly, erotic, and penitential impulses...
...Verwoerd had introduced in 1953...
...but it is more compressed and faster paced, and it is also curiously lighter and even joyful...
...Hendrik's guidance each race will enjoy its "God-given identity" in total separation-a millennium he anticipates by 1976...
...Deriving from the character of his narrator who is so nearly the good man of classical antiquity, Coetzee's book has a curiously Roman-or pre-Christian-sensibility remote from South African reality...
...Paton-born in 1903 and early schooled on Dickens and Hardy - employs a direct and forceful realism...
...But the best fictional invention in this novel is the character Van Onselen, a ranking civil servant in the Department of Justice whose confidential letters to his aunt keep us privy to the determination of the men in power to enforce their Christian National principles...
...How does the man of conscience, or sensitivity, behave in such circumstances...
...In that fateful year black schoolchildren in Soweto rebelled against the system of "Bantu Education" Dr...
...He is unaware of any imminent threat from the barbarians until Colonel Joll of the Third Bureau arrives to prepare for their attack and interrogate suspects...
...In time, he undertakes a dangerous journey to restore her to her people and he is tortured and imprisoned when he returns...
...Paton's superb opening scene matches the best moments of Cry, the Beloved Country...
...He was said to have hanged himself...
...It is a tract for the times...
...This first volume is more than a fine beginning...
...Because of his great narrative skill and mastery of language, Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians is almost Orphic in its enticement to explore Acheron with him...
...Like Leon Uris's Trinity, this novel blends history and fiction...
...Cavafy's poem "Expecting the Barbarians," and, as in that poem, the time and place are left to the imagination...
...Patently, the suspension of habeas corpus may endanger life...
...More than thirty-five others held as he was without charge or hearing-beginning with Looksmart Ngudle in 1963-were also said to have killed themselves, some by jumping from windows, others by falling and striking their heads...
...if you ever become a Christian, you must keep your eyes on Christ so that you will not get a chance to look at Christians...
...the defiance campaign in July 1952 and its action culminates in the inauguration of Hendrik Verwoerd as Prime Minister in September 1958...
...In it, a beautiful young Indian girl, Prem Bodasingh-the only child of wealthy parents through whose tragicomic forebodings we experience the scene-seeks arrest in a Durban public library reserved for whites...
...Paton's novel, the first of a projected trilogy, sticks close to historical events...
...and on March 7, the Chicago Tribune noted that John Sears, who had managed President Reagan's campaign until William Casey took over, received his annual $500,000 as a registered Washington agent for South Africa-in terms of his contract-in quarterly sums of $125,000...
...Other fine fictional moments include a dramatic scene during a Good Friday liturgy when an Afrikaner judge of the supreme court washes-and kisses-the feet of an old black woman who has nursed his children...
...His first approach is a ritual washing and anointing of her crippled feet and ankles smashed by the torturers...
...Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians...
...but, in his novel, rampaging injustice never wholly obliterates the prospect of justice restored...
Vol. 109 • May 1982 • No. 10
