BOOK REVIEW: The Magistrate Of Gower
by Rehana Rossouw,
2015-10-23 05:43:48.0
AS THE National Party rises to power, the lives of Henry Vos and Adaira van Brugge intersect in Gower, a town where an emerging, standard-setting class of Afrikaners welcomes them as upstanding citizens. Both find sheltering spaces, hidden from the eyes of censure, where they dare to love in defiance of the stultifying norm.
Claire Robertson’s magnificent novel spans three decisive decades in SA — the defeat of the Boers in 1902, the proclamation of the union and the National Party coming to power. It captures large swathes of history in compelling, concise detail.
Her most remarkable achievement is that her poetic voice — so rich that her words are to be chewed and digested slowly — never once inhibits her ability to delve deep into the heart of her restrained, yet compelling, main characters.
Every voice rings true, cultural ideals are sharply observed, prejudices are disclosed and passions revealed.
Henry’s tale begins when he is 17, before Adaira is born, on a field at the end of the war. Robertson deftly describes the Boer defeat in the smell of ponies drifting on the wind towards the dismounted and disarmed men seated on the ground.
Henry is transported to the coast along with hundreds of other Boer men, loaded onto a ship and taken to British Ceylon, where he is held at the Diyatalawa prisoner-of-war camp.
Regarded as a well-behaved young man, he is instructed to escort a British woman from a plantation neighbouring the camp on her regular rides to visit nearby. While waiting for her to summon him for their return, he strikes up a passionate friendship with Prem, a young saffron-robed monk.
We encounter him next in Cape Town, as the project to administer each race separately gets under way. Henry has a law degree and is employed at the Department of Native Affairs, where he contemplates the wisdom of legislating the sexual mores of black people in the Eastern Cape.
He makes a home with his sister Anna who, like him, is eager to escape marriage and the family farm for a life in a city with all the modern conveniences. His predictable habits keep him from stepping out of place.
Then Henry is posted to Gower. It is 1935 and he is an Afrikaner in the age of quotas as colonial rule makes way for a local bureaucracy.
Adaira arrives soon after — a young lady with a respectable pedigree and a small legacy that allows her to escape from her father’s mission station.
She is swept into the activities of the town’s do-gooders, becomes a member of the Committee for Social Welfare and wears a Purified National Party badge on her coat lapel. Her other vocation is sorting through Henry’s war memorabilia stored in a room in his house — his own items that bear testimony to his incarceration in the prisoner-of-war camps, and others he has collected over the years.
In that dim room, Henry discloses some of his illicit passions to Adaira, who hopes the "wickedness in her own thinking will be exorcised by listening".
The town of Gower springs to life under Robertson’s keen eye for detail: there’s a station, a row of shops, bioscope in a room attached to the church, a system of culverts to water gardens, a Hole in Wall, where liquor is sold illicitly after dark, and Happy Valley where poor Afrikaners live in shacks after drifting into town impoverished by their failed farms.
Ira Gevint, Gower’s first Jew, sets up a home and a business at a time when the news from Germany emboldens a gang of Happy Valley toughs to attack and the town to withhold its condemnation.
Adaira is drawn to Ira’s persecution, slipping away from the watchful eyes of Gower’s matrons to be with him, until the thugs unleash a vicious attack that has the town reeling.
In the aftermath, Henry presides over a trial sensational enough to draw the media from as far afield as Johannesburg and London. It has the potential to unveil the darkest secret of Gower’s most upstanding citizen — just as the ox wagon re-enacting the Great Trek rolls into town for the centenary celebration.
The Magistrate of Gower describes the scaffolding of a morality imposed just before SA drowned under a torrent of Calvinism. Robertson writes with subtle passion; her story is a harbinger of the straitjacketing as a new nation is being built.
Just like Harper Lee’s town of Maycomb, Alabama, became a byword for racial justice, Gower deserves a place in the canon of literature concerned with the ravaging of lives and loves for a political ideal.
Picture: THINKSTOCK
AS THE National Party rises to power, the lives of Henry Vos and Adaira van Brugge intersect in Gower, a town where an emerging, standard-setting class of Afrikaners welcomes them as upstanding citizens. Both find sheltering spaces, hidden from the eyes of censure, where they dare to love in defiance of the stultifying norm.
Claire Robertson’s magnificent novel spans three decisive decades in SA — the defeat of the Boers in 1902, the proclamation of the union and the National Party coming to power. It captures large swathes of history in compelling, concise detail.
Her most remarkable achievement is that her poetic voice — so rich that her words are to be chewed and digested slowly — never once inhibits her ability to delve deep into the heart of her restrained, yet compelling, main characters.
Every voice rings true, cultural ideals are sharply observed, prejudices are disclosed and passions revealed.
Henry’s tale begins when he is 17, before Adaira is born, on a field at the end of the war. Robertson deftly describes the Boer defeat in the smell of ponies drifting on the wind towards the dismounted and disarmed men seated on the ground.
Henry is transported to the coast along with hundreds of other Boer men, loaded onto a ship and taken to British Ceylon, where he is held at the Diyatalawa prisoner-of-war camp.
Regarded as a well-behaved young man, he is instructed to escort a British woman from a plantation neighbouring the camp on her regular rides to visit nearby. While waiting for her to summon him for their return, he strikes up a passionate friendship with Prem, a young saffron-robed monk.
We encounter him next in Cape Town, as the project to administer each race separately gets under way. Henry has a law degree and is employed at the Department of Native Affairs, where he contemplates the wisdom of legislating the sexual mores of black people in the Eastern Cape.
He makes a home with his sister Anna who, like him, is eager to escape marriage and the family farm for a life in a city with all the modern conveniences. His predictable habits keep him from stepping out of place.
Then Henry is posted to Gower. It is 1935 and he is an Afrikaner in the age of quotas as colonial rule makes way for a local bureaucracy.
Adaira arrives soon after — a young lady with a respectable pedigree and a small legacy that allows her to escape from her father’s mission station.
She is swept into the activities of the town’s do-gooders, becomes a member of the Committee for Social Welfare and wears a Purified National Party badge on her coat lapel. Her other vocation is sorting through Henry’s war memorabilia stored in a room in his house — his own items that bear testimony to his incarceration in the prisoner-of-war camps, and others he has collected over the years.
In that dim room, Henry discloses some of his illicit passions to Adaira, who hopes the "wickedness in her own thinking will be exorcised by listening".
The town of Gower springs to life under Robertson’s keen eye for detail: there’s a station, a row of shops, bioscope in a room attached to the church, a system of culverts to water gardens, a Hole in Wall, where liquor is sold illicitly after dark, and Happy Valley where poor Afrikaners live in shacks after drifting into town impoverished by their failed farms.
Ira Gevint, Gower’s first Jew, sets up a home and a business at a time when the news from Germany emboldens a gang of Happy Valley toughs to attack and the town to withhold its condemnation.
Adaira is drawn to Ira’s persecution, slipping away from the watchful eyes of Gower’s matrons to be with him, until the thugs unleash a vicious attack that has the town reeling.
In the aftermath, Henry presides over a trial sensational enough to draw the media from as far afield as Johannesburg and London. It has the potential to unveil the darkest secret of Gower’s most upstanding citizen — just as the ox wagon re-enacting the Great Trek rolls into town for the centenary celebration.
The Magistrate of Gower describes the scaffolding of a morality imposed just before SA drowned under a torrent of Calvinism. Robertson writes with subtle passion; her story is a harbinger of the straitjacketing as a new nation is being built.
Just like Harper Lee’s town of Maycomb, Alabama, became a byword for racial justice, Gower deserves a place in the canon of literature concerned with the ravaging of lives and loves for a political ideal.
