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THE MONSTER'S DAUGHTER
by Michelle Pretorius
Melville House, July 2016
454 pages
$27.99
ISBN: 1612195385


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

From the vantage point of a solid foothold in the 21st century, THE MONSTER'S DAUGHTER takes a retrospective look at the entire sweep of South African history in the 20th. This is a very ambitious project, especially for a debut, because its author chooses, with some considerable justification, to view the story of the injustices of apartheid as a decades-long crime, one that can only partly be resolved in the present day.

The contemporary narrative is anchored by a young policewoman, Alet Berg, who has been recently re-assigned to Unie, a town in the boondocks. Found out in an affair with a superior officer, she was bounced out of her elite training course and sent off in disgrace. Had her father not been a high-ranking police official, she would have been dismissed. The superior officer is still in place, though his wife is not happy. In Unie, her boss is Sgt. Johannes Mathebe, a Xhosa with a Calvinist turn of mind, who worries about Alet's aggressive and rebellious attitude but who will stand by her.

From the standpoint of challenging policing, Unie offers little beside the usual traffic offences and the occasional farm invasion. One day, however, Mathebe and Alet are called out to a farm where they find the charred body of a young woman. She had been "necklaced," a gasoline-filled tire place around her neck and set alight. From this shocking and unexpected crime, the two police are led into complex and dangerous terrain. In the end, it is an investigation that will confront Alet with her country's past under apartheid and with her own family's complicity in the crimes of that era.

Interwoven with the police enquiry is a narrative detailing the history of two characters, Tessa and Benjamin, half-brother and sister, both the product of an appalling (and, given that it was 1901,frankly impossible) genetic manipulation. They both were born in a notorious concentration camp in which Boer women and children were interned, a quarter of whom died of malnutrition or starvation. While the atrocities of these camps were real enough, Pretorius adds a kind of Mengele forerunner, a British physician who is engaged in mysterious "scientific" experiments. In time we learn that these were designed to produce a master race. Tessa and Benjamin were born and survived, though it is unclear how many, if any, others like them did the same. They both appear almost albino-like and they age very slowly. Tessa, born in 1901, does not die until 2010, when she appears more or less middle-aged. To obscure this peculiarity, Tessa, adopted as a small child, is protected from suspicious inquiries by her family's willingness to relocate and rename her, so that she is in various schools in various towns for many years. Ben was less lucky in life and his subsequent life-story is perhaps a testament to what may become of children who are neglected or abused in their early years. In any event, both characters change their names frequently and the reader is advised that keeping a list might be useful.

Because of their longevity, the life stories of Tessa and Benjamin unfold against the larger background of South African history. Of the two, Tessa is the more compelling and by far the more sympathetic. But for readers only dimly familiar with the country's apartheid past, what these lives reveal about it may be the most interesting element in this long and complicated novel.

THE MONSTER'S DAUGHTER is a very ambitious debut. Pretorius apparently wishes to raise the important question of the moral situation of the descendants of those who invented and enforced that system of oppression for so many years. Whether attempting to bundle that problem into a police procedural with a tinge of sci-fi and a substantial freight of historical information was altogether wise is another question. Still Pretorius writes well enough to keep the reader going and Alet, the chief representative of the post-apartheid generation of Boers, is prickly enough that she does not represent an easy or even hopeful resolution to the question of inherited guilt.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal. She's been editing RTE since 2008.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, August 2016

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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