Short description
Half-brothers and blood enemies, Manfred De La Rey and Shasa Courtney are caught up in an age-old and savage war to seize the sword of power in their land.
Review
Sequel to 1985's The Burning Shore and probable middle volume of a trilogy about 20th-century South Africa - though it's as hard to see Smith's grandly melodramatic characters as real men and women. In the first volume the beautiful Centaine de Thiry had two illegitimate sons, one with Michael Courtney, a Sooth African aviator, and another, later, by a handsome Boer, Lothar De La Rey, who heroically rescued her from the bush country. When he revealed a streak of unconscionable cruelty, she gave into his custody her child by him, on the proviso that she never have to see the child and that Lothar lead her back into the bush, where she was sure there were diamonds. Soon, Centaine became one of the richest women in the world. Her sons Shasa Courtney and Manfred De La Rey never meet, though - until the opening of the present volume, when, not knowing they are half-brothers, they have a fistfight almost at first sight. The cruel Lothar has gone into the fishing industry but is losing money in the Depression; in fact, Centaine has foreclosed on his fishery. Later, the same Depression brings strikes to Centaine's diamond mines, and when she attempts to flee with all her choicest stones, Lothar robs her on the road and tries to reduce her to his status - though eventually Centaine again gets her revenge and Lothar is jailed for life. Meanwhile, the two sons have their own lives. Manfred becomes a gold medalist in boxing at the Berlin Olympics while WW II sweeps up Shasa. He emerges as a supporter of Prime Minister Jan Christian Smuts, whom Manfred tries to assassinate for his liberal views. Manfred is also part of secret brotherhoods which help set him up as their postwar apostle and political rival to Shasa. The story ends on Manfred's widely trumpeted and accepted enunciation of the Apartheid movement and his victory over Shasa. Smith has a novelist's eye for the imaginatively enlarged detail and avoids banality of style while punching out pages at a dizzying rate (622 pages for this year's installment). If his posturing, passionate characters rarely if ever have the thump of life, he's nonetheless a storyteller who can plunge you under for the length of each novel, undoubtedly explaining his large world readership. (Kirkus Reviews)