The novelist's 10th work is perfect for lazy days, aeroplanes and book clubs everywhere.
In bookshops now, emblazoned with a sticker promising “love this book or your money back”, Gillian Slovo’s 10th novel is eminently likeable and smarter than it looks, a compelling historical novel suited to lazy days, aeroplanes and book clubs everywhere.
An Honourable Man follows the formula Slovo has practised since turning from the crime thrillers with which she began her writing career, and which she perfected in Ice Road (2004), short-listed for the Orange Prize. Her more recent novels use a pivotal historical moment to examine the impact of political and cultural changes on the individuals who live through them, individuals at the mercy of overwhelming forces, victims and witnesses both.
In this latest book, Slovo’s subject is the shambolic and bloody end of the British Empire in the Sudan, and her story moves between those honourable if arrogant men who face a nasty death in the desert and those honourable if ideologically blinkered men who fight the political war in London that could save them. But the real hero of the novel is Mary, the young wife of a military surgeon, alone and adrift among the tumultuous transformations of late-Victorian society, whose addiction to laudanum leads her to adventure rivalling her husband’s.
The story is told through the first-person narratives of a multitude of players, both low and high, major and minor, interspersed with letters, diary entries and newspaper reports, to offer a larger picture made up of the composite of smaller parts; that’s a perfect metaphor for the action of history that An Honourable Man describes, but it’s also what makes it such an easy read, with pace, variety and suspense aplenty. It’s the rare reader who will seek a refund.
AN HONOURABLE MAN, by Gillian Slovo (Virago, $36.99).
Louise O’Brien is a Wellington reviewer.