This is Damian Barr's first novel, but far from his literary debut. He wrote a very successful and much lauded memoir Maggie & Me published in 2013 and has become a recognisable and likeable figure on the literary scene, online and on TV.
You Will Be Safe Here is divided into two sections, both set in South Africa in different time periods. One half during the Boer War, the second in the decades prior to Mandela's release to the political factionalism after his death. There are thematic links between both halves, of enforced imprisonment, torture and isolation. The white Boers in the first half are fighting for independence from their colonial oppressors, whilst in the second some of their descendants are AWB supremacists trying to rebuild their lost kudos. The central white characters in the 70's through to 2000's, frequently struggle with or resent their diminished position in the new South Africa. Anger and disdain being replaced by mawkish bravado.
The book introduces us to the dubious morality of a British run concentration camp during the Boer War. In every shameful way the antecedent of the Nazi extermination camps and the Soviet Gulags, and all subsequent systematic genocides since. Here the wives and children of Boer resistance fighters are incarcerated, held in an attempt to break their husbands resolve. The Boer women in these camps are told 'you will be safe here', but in reality its far from so. Barely provided enough food and provisions to survive on, many, its estimated at over 25,000, die horrendously.
Barr uses the device of a secretly written diary of a Mrs Van de Watt to highlight our ancestors reprehensible behaviour. It holds a mirror up to how the British conveniently wash their hands and overlook their colonial atrocities. Burying them beneath a veneer of parental benevolence and patronising tolerance.
In the second South African period we follow the messy lives roughly scraped together by Rayna, her illegitimate daughter Irma, and her son Willem. Willem is also born into illegitimacy, and grows up seemingly at odds with with everyone else's expectations of him, he's a boy not yet a man but already being told he's not yet legitimate enough in his masculinity. When Irma hitches up with Jan, an overt supporter of De Klerk and the AWB, Willem's life takes a definite turn for the worse. Jan convinces Irma it would be best for Willem to be sent to a New Dawn Camp where they'll knock him into shape. What starts out as pseudo military discipline ends up as altogether more sadistic.
The original inspiration to write the book arose from reading a newspaper article, of a real life story of a young gay man who was sent to just such a camp and died there from appalling mistreatment. Barr's story takes a similar tragic trajectory, and his obvious empathy for it, means it has a lot more going for it as a narrative. The Boer war diary, surprisingly, has a less cogent emotional pull.
Any novel with such a division in the storyline, creates a fissure down its middle that can prove tricky to pull into a cohesive whole. 'You will be safe here' has an off kilter emotional landscape, even though there is historically and contextually continuity stretching across it. Threads are picked up in the second part from the first, but they are just threads, they do not feel sufficiently integral to the story arc to compellingly bond it together. Whilst it is an admirable book, I'm not sure Barr has completely mastered the task he created for himself. Yet it is a finely wrought debut novel, ambitious, with moments of great impact, so it bodes well for whatever he chooses to write next.
CARROT REVIEW - 5/8
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