More than a Thriller
LEKACHMAN, ROBERT
More than a Thriller A Song in the Morning By Gerald Seymour Norton. 364 pp. $16.95. Reviewed by Robert Lekachman My durable distinction between thrillers and novels is simple: A...
...He resolves somehow to rescue him...
...Three weeks have elapsed since I completed Gerald Seymour's evocation of life in South Africa...
...Jack lives with her and her second husband...
...A simple, even a sentimental tale...
...transplanted Britons less virulent than the descendents of the Boers, although no less determined to preserve a pampered way of life premised upon exploitation of their ignored black neighbors...
...The reality is that Jeez had spent 10 years in grim Albanian prisons as the result of a failed intelligence operation...
...Although against impossible odds the five condemned men do escape, Jeez and Jack soon are trapped...
...Afrikaners imbued with the sense that God blesses their dominion over the unfortunately pigmented...
...Impressive, too, is Seymour's rendering of the South African milieu—violent security policemen and equally violent blacks...
...The stoical Jeez is as alone as me human condition permits...
...Not only do his major personages remain as clear images in an aging brain, but I could tell the book's story at length...
...Jeez gratefully tells his son: "You got me to see a morning coming...
...A Song in the Morning will not Eft your spirits...
...Through a sympathetic government bureaucrat, Jack learns of his father's impending execution...
...One of his radical friends puts him in touch with members of the ANC in London...
...When he returned to a hero's welcome his mentor, a blimpish Colonel, advised him not to present himself to his remarried former wife and adult son...
...Plausibly enough, Seymour traces the chain of contacts, initially in England and then in South Africa, that provides explosives for Jack...
...I did read, as an example of fashionable minimalism, Renata Adler's Speedboat...
...He persuades Jacob Thiroko, an ANC leader dying of cancer, to lead a small group into South Africa to support the escape of Jeez and the four blacks sentenced to hang with him...
...Best not to inspect the hovels to which their maids and gardeners return...
...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman My durable distinction between thrillers and novels is simple: A week after I have finished reading yet another account of World War III narrowly averted by the cunning and heroism of one of our spies, or occasionally of an enlightened KGB type, I can recall neither plot, major characters, title, or author...
...Save as servants, white suburban families meet few blacks...
...Jeez, it turns out, is a British intelligence agent instructed to infiltrate the ANC...
...Yet there are no outright villains in the novel...
...The man has in fact written a moving political novel, as a sequel to a series of superior thrillers set in such troubled locales as Northern Ireland and Afghanistan...
...Actually, much the same is true of bad or merely pretentious novels...
...You got me to feel the fresh wind on my face...
...No need to visit Soweto...
...But it will probably persuade you more forcefully than the best of journalistic accounts that the South African future is bleak...
...He does expect, however, to be rescued by his associates...
...Jeez, around whom the action revolves, is under sentence of death for his participation along with four blacks in terrorism sponsored by Umkonto we Sizwe—the Spear of the Nation...
...He is also a sophisticated political observer, as mordant in his analysis of English as of South African governmental maneuvers...
...In driving the terrorists' getaway van, he has exceeded his orders...
...That faith endures as the days tick away and his only human consolation is his warder, the compassionate Sergeant Oosthuizen...
...In a few brief hours, they become acquainted and die on their feet with rifles in their hands...
...His son, an apolitical college dropout, knows no more of his father than his mother has told him...
...His work for a construction firm has acquainted him with explosives...
...Jack perseveres, aided by a young, crippled white university student who is an ANC courier and his sister, who considers the operation insane but continues to protect her younger brother...
...My recollection of its contents is precisely zero, probably a fitting response to the perpetrator's literary strategy...
...The group is betrayed and killed at the border...
...The enterprise is indeed doomed...
...Jeez, totally faithful to his agency, never reveals his affiliations to his thuggish jailers...
...What elevates it into the honorable company of Graham Greene and perhaps André Malraux is partly the author's invention of believable characters that are far more complex than the usual serviceable stick figures in thrillers...
...Accordingly, Her Majesty's government intends to do nothing to free him, lest relations with the South Africans encounter unnecessary embarrassment...
...Jeez' wife bitterly believes that he deserted her many years ago...
...The organization is the military instrument of the African National Congress (ANC), under constant surveillance, infiltration and attack by highly efficient South African security operatives and military units...
Vol. 70 • April 1987 • No. 5
