Book Review : Story About South Africa Overwhelmed by Headlines

The Innocents by Carolyn Slaughter (Scribner’s: $16.95)

Can a novel ever be too timely? Unfortunately for “The Innocents,” the answer is a rueful yes. Set in post-contemporary South Africa, the brittle plot and fragile characterization seem completely overwhelmed by headlines more dramatic than the situations contrived by the author. The threat of civil war looming ominously over Zelda de Valera, threatening the future of the vast farm to which she has devoted her life, is now a stark actuality. The racial tensions shown here in microcosm have escalated to involve the entire country, and the theme that must have seemed manageable when Carolyn Slaughter began the book has since exploded, shattering the novel’s framework and distracting us from fictional problems.

If Zelda de Valera, her brother Dawie, her niece Ruth and their close friend and loyal retainer Hannah were figures of truly heroic proportions, they might have served as human metaphors for South Africa today, but the de Valeras lack that stature. Forced by circumstances to complete with reality, they shrink and pale before our eyes; their plight just one of many far more frightful, unjust, but most damaging of all, infinitely more urgent. Though Slaughter deserves credit for tackling one of the most difficult subjects of the decade, events have conspired against her to create an overmatch.

Hermetic Isolation

Three women live in hermetic isolation on the prosperous De Valera farm. Zelda has inherited the property, managing it ever since her brother Dawie abandoned his inheritance to become a civil rights lawyer in Johannesburg. Though Hannah has been Zelda’s intimate since childhood, her mixed blood dooms her to a twilight life on the estate, eluding deportation to a native district only by posing as a servant when in fact she shares responsibility almost equally with Zelda. The third presence on the farm is Ruth, a moody and restless 16-year-old, whose only friend is the sensitive and intelligent young black man, Willie.

Orphaned in infancy, Ruth has been brought up by Zelda and Hannah. Told only the most minimal facts about the auto accident that killed her parents, Ruth is tormented by unanswered questions. Zelda refuses to discuss the matter; Hannah, with whom Ruth has far greater rapport, is strangely evasive. Ruth has had a miserable and lonely girlhood and now seems destined for an even more wretched adult life unless she can discover the secret that has so blighted her existence. Like thousands of characters before her, Ruth is convinced the truth will set her free.

In a series of flashbacks to the time when Zelda and Dawie were small children, we learn that Zelda had discovered Hannah playing at the river, and in her willful way, had forced her parents to accept the village child into their small family, a task made easier by a vague, invalid mother and a generally absent father. Hannah grew up in the mansion house, sharing lessons with Zelda and Dawie; the three forming an inseparable unit until Dawie was sent off to boarding school. Inevitably, given the remoteness of the De Valera farm and the closeness of the association among the adolescents, Hannah and Dawie fell in love. After considerable anguish, Dawie bowed to the law of the land and married a racially impeccable but otherwise reprehensible woman, leaving Hannah to her pathetic half-life on the farm as Zelda’s general factotum; the bonds between the two women intensified by their mutual relationship to each other and to Dawie.

As the social and political tensions around the farm heighten, life there becomes difficult for the women and unendurable for Ruth, who runs away to find the father whose death she has never accepted as fact. Willie assists her in this desperate project, showing himself to be protective, solicitous and endlessly resourceful. Because Ruth is white and Willie black, they’re in constant danger of discovery and punishment. Finally, in despair of finding clues to her father’s whereabouts or existence, Ruth admits defeat and agrees to return to the farm, a decision forced by her advanced pregnancy. Since until this point the reader has not been introduced to any friends or lovers except Willie, we’re bound to assume the child is his. Though that guess is wrong, there is so little suspense in “The Innocents” that providing any hints would destroy the frail mystery Slaughter has struggled to create.

The author’s strengths are in the lyrical descriptions of the South Africa landscape. In her familiarity with the conditions of life in these farming villages and in the tragic effects of inhuman laws upon people of both races. Though the story is predictable, as background to the torment of South Africa today, “The Innocents” deserves a place on suggested reading lists.