Gerri Kimber

In yet another example of how deeply unsettling Boehmer’s narrative is, where security and normality are almost wholly absent from every aspect of Ella’s life, at school, for reasons that are never explained, Ella is placed in a remedial class for misfits. As always, she learns to adapt, to make herself belong in the class, even though she has no idea why she is there. Even a trip back to the Netherlands with her mother to spend time with her relatives is bookended by the sheer horror of the journey. Her mother’s morbid fear of flying is so cleverly detailed by Boehmer, and we see its effect on Ella, who watches – almost clinically – her mother’s descent into total hysteria, to the embarrassment of the crew and other passengers.

Once in Holland, her mother gradually regains her composure, and the months spent with her Dutch relatives offer an interlude of normality for Ella, who paints pictures and visits the zoo, where, nevertheless, a haunting image of a swaying polar bear, confined and restrained, offers a bleak reminder of Ella’s true home life. She spends time with her grandmother and her cousins, and for once is not in the enforced semi-isolation of her family, imposed by her irascible father who loathes all his wife’s – and his own – Dutch relations, all except the first Ella, of course, but then, she is dead.

The relationship between father and daughter is the moving force of the novel, through which Boehmer cleverly weaves an entire history of the colonisation of South Africa and the injustices of apartheid. Ella is witness to her father’s implacable hatred of progress, of black South Africans, of the government, and politics in general. Her brief relationship with the young black family gardener, Phineas, so poignantly and lightly depicted, speaks volumes for apartheid South Africa in the time the novel is set. The young black teenager is far more cognisant of the ramifications such a relationship would embroil him in than is Ella. Her almost complete lack of understanding of the grim reality of the racist world in which they live only serves to make the situation bleaker. Even nature plays its part in the novel, for Ella’s house is particularly prone to lightning strikes, as if to emphasise the cursed luck of a family for whom nothing ever goes right.

The penny-pinching meanness of Ella’s home life, the cataclysmic awfulness of her situation, is reminiscent of Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm. The absence of hope is only mitigated towards the end by Ella’s scholarship to Canada, and the prospect of escape, though all the while her homeland draws her back. Ella’s inner anger at her situation is expressed in her growing sense of activism, fighting apartheid.  She is, in fact, the antithesis of her father, now standing for everything he would have despised. Ultimately, however, there can be no escape for Ella, who finally understands that to return to South Africa and face her demons is her only hope for recovery and resolution.

Mesmerised and haunted, the reader finally puts the book down, blinking back into the light. The journey has been cataclysmic, Ella the protagonist has changed and grown so much, and so, ultimately, have we. No author can deliver an experience more profound than this, Elleke Boehmer’s most powerful, spellbinding novel to date.

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