Book Reviews

Ladysmith: A Novel

Knopf, 304 pp., $25

The violent clash of cultural forces in South Africa during the Anglo-Boer War provides the subject matter for Ladysmith, the second novel from Giles Foden. Whereas in his first novel, The Last King of Scotland, the evil wreaking havoc in Uganda came from the inside in the form of dictator Idi Amin, in Ladysmith it is a convergence of two forces that are both foreign to the continent that devastates both the land and the people. Appropriately, the singular narrative voice of his first book, which dealt with the singular force of Amin, has been replaced by multiple points of view, as the third person tells the story of the siege of the South African town of Ladysmith by the Boers at the turn of the past century from many points of view: the attacking Boers, the defending Brits, the Africans caught in the middle, and the journalists who bring the story to the outside world.

Ladysmith plants the reader firmly in history, introducing both Winston Churchill and Mohandas Gandhi as characters early on, and dragging its tale through the 120-day siege of Ladysmith, a stronghold that was pivotal to the proliferation of the British empire. Winding through the history are the stories of those caught up in the siege, told from perspectives including a British soldier, a Boer doctor, a Portuguese barber, a Zulu mine worker and his wife and son, an English journalist and biographer, and the daughter of an Irish innkeeper. This last point of view, that of Bella Kiernan, is the one that dominates the novel (if indeed one is dominant at all). It is the change in Bella as both woman and survivor that drives the story forward. While everyone else is being dragged along with the paradoxical coexistence of intense boredom and constant shelling and gunfire, Bella is busy growing up, staking out her territory as a free-thinking individual, and falling in love. Yes, there's a love story going on (as apparently there must be), and its awkward twists and turns are as seemingly random as they are surprising. What threatens to trip this book up, though, is the all-too-conscious presence of one too many storytellers.

Foden's transitions from one voice to another are sometimes so heavy-handed that it's impossible for his story to not seem self-conscious. Where one chapter ends with Churchill sipping coffee, the next opens with Muhle (the Zulu mine worker) noticing the blossoms on a coffee bush; an examination of the Boer battle strategy compared to a game at one chapter's end limps into a card game among soldiers in the next. Still, though, these massive billboards don't obstruct the whole view. The pain-inducing descriptions of the endless battle, the wonderment at the continuing folly of warlike man (not woman), and the small triumphs of the individual spirit along the way make Ladysmith a siege worth enduring.