Is this 900-page South Africa saga much more spotty and ill-shaped than Chesapeake and Centennial—or does it just seem so because we can't automatically fill in the gaps of history ourselves this time? In any case, Michener is using his familiar approach here: tracing a region's history through a few families, with a not-always-congenial mix of soap opera, celebrity cameos, and textbook lessons. He begins with a glimpse of prehistoric Bushmen crossing the desert (going south) in search of water, but then he quickly introduces the first of his central dynasties: in the 1450s, black youth Nxumalo is inspired by white gold-traders, treks north to the rich city of Zimbabwe, and witnesses its tragic abandonment; 350 years (and 300 pages) later, his descendant plays Brutus to the Caesar of mad, mother-obsessed Zulu king Shaka (who unifies the tribes via constant bloody warfare); and in the 1970s, Prof. Daniel Nxumalo, non-violent black activist, will be tried for high treason. Overall, however, the varied non-whites—Hottentots, Xhosa, Zulu, Coloured—get relatively little space here, with the prime focus on the Europeans. The Dutch Van Doorns are the key clan, beginning when young Willem is among a group of castaways forced to settle on the Cape in the 1640s: he impregnantes a beloved Malay slave (the start of the "Coloured" population) but marries an imported Dutch bride and, after founding a top winemaking farm (with crucial help from a Huguenot refugee), proudly coins the term "Afrikaner"; his grandson becomes one of the "trekboers" who move east with herds, battling blacks for land; and when English rule comes in the early 1800s, this hinterlands branch of the fiercely Calvinistic Van Doorns will be at the center of Boer resistance-taking part in the Great Trek north to escape Anglo laws, suffering Zulu massacre, reaffirming their supposed land "covenant" with God in the 1838 Battle of Blood River, rebelling against English language and regulation with full-scale (or guerrilla) war, dying in Kitchener's concentration camps, supporting Germany in both world wars, but finally establishing Afrikaner control through slow acquisition of administrative positions. (In the 1950s Detleef Van Doom, seemingly singlehanded, institutes detailed apartheid.) And the English are represented by the Saltwoods: 1820s missionary Hilary incurs Boer wrath by opposing slavery and wedding rescued slave Emma ("his marvelous little assistant with the laughing eyes"); knighted brother Richard organizes relief for starving Xhosa; Richard's grandson Frank is one of Cecil Rhodes' "young men" (soon disillusioned) and performs ugly Boer War duties before standing up to Kitchener; and the 1970s Saltwoods will defend civil rights while a distant American relation digs for diamonds, befriends Prof. Nxumalo, and loves a Van Doorn. A wealth of fascinating material—and Michener does his best to balance Boer intransigence (with its religious base) against imperious English mistakes, to find shreds of decency among patterns of cruelty and obtuseness. But, despite a chapter devoted to apartheid horrors (So. Africa has banned the book), the non-white side of things never becomes humanly specific. And one somehow ends this huge volume with little feel for historical continuity or for the physical setting (a surprising lapse from Michener). . . and none at all for contemporary South Africa. (You'll get far more real sense of the people and place in fiction by Nadine Gordimer or James McClure.) Still, despite these flaws and the more usual ones—B-movie dialogue, preachy digressions, corny coincidences. clichÉs and stereotypes galore—Michener's flocks of fans will certainly get the bulk and variety and epic events they expect; and, when all is said and done, how many surefire bestsellers are as clean-hearted, well-meaning, and undeniably educational as a Michener mammoth? Easy to put down, then (in both senses of the word), but worthy and welcome.
Pub Date: Nov. 24, 1980
ISBN: 0449214206
Page Count: 1242
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1980
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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