12 year old Alex and his younger brother Kevin Thorne are a pair of brothers growing up in 1980s South Africa. They are poor but white and although the book is set pre the breakdown of apartheid their world is changing. Their brutal, devious and selfish but charming father Bruce teaches them how to con and bully their way through a world where his brand of violent chauvanism is beginning to be replaced by values of social justice and mutual respect. As their parents' marriage splinters under the force of Bruce's (a play on brutal?) savage narcissism the brothers and their mother Grace struggle to cope and the climax of the story is a tragedy that warns against answering violence with violence.
As first person narrator it is Alex's voice we hear most clearly, and follow his coming of age as he moves from trying to emulate his father to finding another way. The evocation of pre-apartheid South Africa, the institutional racism and bigotry, the patchwork of languages and the heat of Pretoria, cool of the Drakensburg and humidity of Durban is extremely powerful. Alex's narrative is couched as a series of anecdotes, much in the way Bruce would tell stories, but these are not witty and entertaining, they are painful recollections of brutality and humiliation, and of Alex's sense of his failure to protect his little brother.
Some people may see Bruce as a sterotypical bad guy but he isn't, Donald has written an elegant and devastating account of what it is like to grow up choked in the shadow of such a powerful personality. This is one of the hardest and best books I've read in some time.
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