Dry White Season Book

This is probably Brink's most deservedly famous book, and I have been wanting to read since reading Rumours Of Rain last year. It is an impassioned and often brutal account of what happens when an ordinary man questions an authoritarian state, in this case the apartheid South Africa of the 70s.

Ben Du Toit is an ordinary Afrikaner school history teacher. He becomes involved when the first son of his school's caretaker, a boy who has worked for Ben's family, dies while being held by the security police. The caretaker Gordon Ngubene is unable to accept the official explanation, and involves Ben in his investigations. Gordon is arrested and also dies in custody, and the police claim that he hanged himself.

The book follows Ben's dogged pursuit of the truth, and how the apparatus of the state frustrates it, ultimately murderously, and the way this affects Ben's friends and families. There is a framing device of a prologue and epilogue which introduce the ghost writer, an old college friend and writer of cheap romantic fiction with whom Ben has entrusted the notes he has kept hidden.

Brink is very strong on the mechanisms and compromises that make ordinary people complicit with the excesses of the state, but like his hero Ben he never entirely loses hope that the questioning will eventually bring change, and in the light of what happened over the next decade in South Africa this seems very prescient.