The background
Philida by André Brink concerns South Africa in the 1830s, before slavery was abolished. Philida is a household slave in the family of Cornelis Brink (a relative of the author.) She enters into an affair with Cornelis’ son, François, who promises her freedom, but then disowns her children and sells her to another family, a carpenter called Labyn, where she converts to Islam. Reviewers are praising Brink’s courage in choosing this family episode, but are divided over whether he’s handled it well; it’s been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
A dense, difficult novel
This is a “dense, difficult novel,” said David Robson in The Sunday Telegraph. The subject matter is “extremely sad, not to say harrowing.” He suggested that what with all the thrashings and beatings, you might not want to take it “to the beach.” One has to “salute” Brink’s courage in tackling this episode in his family’s history; but Brink uses too many “literary tricks” to make it compelling. You feel “that the same story could have been delivered more simply and much more effectively.”
But this is a story that has to be told
Patrick Flanery in The Daily Telegraph disagreed. This is “a shifting portrait of a community where race and power intertwine to pervert white owners while dehumanising people of color.” Philida isn’t “a passive victim” – “emboldened by the hope of imminent emancipation,” her language “becomes ever more defiant.” This is a “moving story of one woman’s struggle against hierarchies of race and gender.” It is “familiar”, sure, but this story “must continue to be told, not least by white writers willing, as Brink is, to disinter the histories of complicity buried in their own ancestries.”
It’s a curious production
The book is “a curious production,” said Peter Kemp in The Sunday Times. There are loads of “plodding factual detail” which “coexist with weird flights of fantasy.” Philida makes a journey “chronicled with such pedestrian minuteness you feel you are not so much reading a narrative as having your face flattened against the page of an atlas.” Yet elsewhere we move into “hazily magic-realist terrain.” And despite all the knitting metaphors (there are lots), Brink has got “himself into a hapless tangle.” There is so sense of danger in Philida’s life. She is in fact “a sentimentalised icon of triumphant resistance to enslavement,” though her “protest comes to nothing.”
But it works
Brink has been shortlisted for the Booker twice before, said Paul Dunn in The Times, and his presence defies the idea that this year’s list is “handing over to a new generation.” He’s 77. Here, he “combines an unflinching examination of the cruelities inflicted on the African people by their Afrikaner masters with an attempt to give voice to the tradition that sustained them.” It is a “rich and complex novel,” and “much more than a horror story,” showing a “deep love of the South African countryside.” His “confident writing” works.