The tragic history of South Africa, replete with conflicts about the environment and race relations, serves as the background of Deon Meyer’s novels. His protagonists are usually hard men, befitting the harsh environment and rugged country, where lions and leopards, elephants and elands roam. Lemmer, a mostly silent, taciturn security expert, primarily a bodyguard, is just such a person. He has a violent past and tempestuous personality. He also is fairly introspective, observant, and prone to categorizing people, thus formulating various “laws” pigeon-holing various types of persons.
Lemmer’s latest assignment has him serving as a bodyguard to a rich heiress who is attacked in her home by three masked men after she telephones a remote police station to inquire about a man whose picture she fleetingly saw on television. She believes the man might be her long-lost brother who disappeared many years before in Kruger National Park and reportedly died thereafter. The man is charged with murdering five men and goes by another last name (while sharing the same first name). Lemmer accompanies her north to determine the man’s identity.
So the journey gives Meyer the opportunity not only to write a vivid story about this particular journey, but the countryside and political conditions of South Africa. As one game preserve manager observes: “This is still the old South Africa. No, that’s not entirely true. The mindset of everyone, black and white, is in the old regime, but all the problems are new South Africa. And that makes for an ugly combination. Racism and progress, hate and cooperation, suspicion and reconciliation . . . those things do not lie well together.” And the problems are compounded by the competing forces of the environmentalists and proponents of ‘progress.’ All told against a well-written, succinct plot. Highly recommended.
**Translated by K. L. Seegers
