Across the Color Bar

...Camus' presence is strongly felt through echoes of La Peste and, more generally, through the sense of individuals—all answerable for the decisions they make —continually defying their destiny...

...Indeed, one of the great achievements of his novel—and of the best South African literature, from the likes of Nadine Gordimer, Athol Fu-gard and Coetzee—is the way it disabuses us of any illusion we can separate the purely personal and the politicohistori-cal...

...But he chooses to practice his craft, thereby placing himself in the predicament of every white South African writer...

...Racial fences are so high and forbidding that it is hard to authentically capture the black or Colored perspective...

...She becomes uneasy about her longstanding affection for Paul once he proposes, however, and goes down to Provence to do a stint of solitary reflection while investigating film locations...

...Now he and a companion are touring Europe to raise money for the resistance movement...

...to her abandoned country and to her own past...

...Its concluding, delicately self-conscious pages confer additional stature on a novel that addresses, quite persuasively, the difficulties of breaching the walls of hatred and exile and, beyond that, of bearing "the full weight of one's own whole history, one's whole self, all one's possibilities...

...Andrea sees a different kind of metaphor in the 18 th-century structure: On her trip southward she is heartened by its poor condition...

...Invariably Paul and Andrea look back against their better judgment, reluctantly learning the limits of the conscientious forgetfulness that seeks to shore up the present by sealing off the past...

...But once it becomes clear that South African hit men are trying to get him, an insistent Paul forces her to hide the revolutionary in Provence...

...Little here is cloying...

...The Wall of the Plague extends little sympathy to embittered expats who, aware they will never go back, nonetheless studiously cultivate homesickness by rubbing salt in their festering recollections...

...His central character, Andrea Malgas, takes the second course...

...Brink has named Albert Camus— another writer who treated the plague metaphorically—and the study of history as the two abiding influences on his fiction...

...They realize, in addition, that the willed disruption of a life, a perfectly clean break, is an even rarer achievement than a life of continuity...

...Occasionally the symbolism seems a bit untidy and grandiloquent ("Anything that can keep one person away from another is a Wall of the Plague...

...Perhaps inspired by the example of J. M. Coetzee's Waitingfor the Barbarians, Brink has made this a highly allegorical work...

...At the same time, Brink's responsiveness to history—his awareness of how forcibly our choices can be narrowed —tempers his insistence on personal culpability...

...Some of Brink' s most striking passages trace the innumerable successive humiliations of Andrea's adolescence and early 20s...

...Andrea, finding Mandla bumptious, caustic and intrusive, rejects him completely...

...The disaffected Afrikaans writer abroad, Paul convinces and intrigues us by resonating Brink's dilemmas, particularly that vexed question: "What is the weight of a book against the turmoil of history...

...That singularly ambiguous status leaves her marginally less oppressed than the Africans, yet like them she has to suffer the indignity of being first and foremost "nonwhite" —that is, of being defined negatively...

...it remains an accessible, compelling read...

...Although he is treated well by Paul, the angry black man resents his benefactor's medieval fixation because he thinks it represents Paul's thorough detachment from the real South Africa...

...Paul Jou-bert has long had a productive, flourishingly cosmopolitan existence abroad...

...Mandla then whittles away at his unwilling companion until he transforms her utterly: He persuades Andrea to rethink her commitments to Paul...

...Andrea's discovery that it is impossible to simply choose to ignore the past, that willy-nilly one is a product of it, is provoked by the black man's presence: "Now at least I understood, as I looked into Mandla's eyes to see my own reflected in them: They've become like that, not because they wanted to, but because nothing private had been left to them...

...Andrea's break seems defiant and clean...

...or they can spurn the rice-world entirely and return to the pebbledom they fled...

...Eventually, she falls in love with a visiting English academic and decides to leave the country permanently, rather than endure the anguish of a romance "across the color bar" that would make her a police plaything...

...The distinctive drama of Andre Brink's latest novel, his sixth, is played out among these options, and his exiled South Africans experience great anxiety attempting to accept one or the other of them...

...Mandla's claims to the contrary notwithstanding, for example, Paul's apparent fascination with the Black Death is not so much a denial of his South African experience as a displacement of it...

...Unexpectedly, after eight years of exile, the journey south reconnects her to that earlier, much deeper, south...

...When her marriage to the Englishman fails she moves to France, settling down there with a white South African novelist in a relationship that survives almost despite the lovers' South Africanness, not because of it...

...And this book's distinctive texture can be ascribed in part to the author's ability to balance these passions...

...Brink is at his finest tracing the politics that shadows the most seemingly discreet of ambitions...

...That is only partly true: The main action unfolds in France, yet ongoing events and reminiscences are so thoroughly interlaced that the author succeeds in creating a densely emotional portrait of contemporary South African society that is thrown into striking relief by the European backdrop...

...For the author and his character the decision to enter the world of someone who is a woman and a person of mixed race to boot can be viewed as admirable— or, alternatively, as an act of the sheerest effrontery...

...In stirring up what she has deliberately smoothed over, Mandla makes Andrea realize that as a Colored, far from being perfectly neutral, she must choose between a black and a white self...

...Since memories are seldom canceled— they are merely withheld temporarily —both of them come to recognize, in their distinctive ways, that in political as in sexual matters new passions never entirely displace the old...

...Equally important to the success of The Wall of the Plague are its deft changes in narrative voice: A third-person perspective periodically yields to the more intimate tones of Andrea in the first person and vice versa...

...He and Andrea are committed to a fresh start and appear to have left their respective yesterdays behind...

...Paul wonders whether literature is not a weak surrogate for direct, substantial action...

...Then, in a final tour de force, Brink confidently adopts the vantage point of Paul, who narrates the strong closing section...

...The novel has been billed as Brink's first set outside South Africa...

...Here, especially, we feel Paul airing Brink's personal quandary...

...He might have gone on to say that all "expats" face three possibilities: They can seek out their fellow pebbles and become professional, self-conscious outcasts, fraternizing and reminiscing with their own kind...

...The chief catalyst is Mandla, a member of a generation of young Africans whose smouldering rage was fanned by the police savagery of the 1976 Soweto riots...

...Reviewed by Rob Nixon Contributor, "Critical Texts" Ezehel Mphahlele, the black South African writer, once remarked that expatriation is "like being a pebble in a mouthful of rice...

...they can shed their rigidity and adapt themselves to the surrounding rice...

...the most forbidding obstacles, she concludes, are more friable than you might suspect...

...But as the story takes shape it becomes increasingly clear that to reject an intolerable background is not necessarily to be free...

...In her native land she is officially a "Colored," neither black nor white...

...For Brink, there are two courageous paths: returning to face the music, or starting a fresh and unsentimental life elsewhere...

...Fortunately, such blemishes do not seriously mar the novel...

...Andrea assists and encourages Paul's obsession: a plan to make a movie on the bubonic plague, the Black Death that ravaged all of Europe in the 14th century, and France in the 1720s...

...She has good reason...

...To him the wall evoked in the title, built in Provence to prevent the plague from spreading, is emblematic of all the great divides that sunder human communities—and especially of those ample barriers that seek to keep South African Blacks at bay...