The beauty of this book (beauty sounds slightly incongruous when the subject matter is so dark) is in the craft of the author. The surprising revelations keep adding layer upon layer of flesh to the key characters, and as a reviewer I don't want to spoil the effect by giving plot summaries that spill the beans and dilute the reading experience.
Flanery focuses on the details of a handful of individual lives and the detail becomes a gateway to the wider picture of apartheid. Individuals struggle with the truth (what really happened? what was my role?), while the government and its institutions employed its own perverse economy. Flanery represents the contrasting behaviour of his white characters, but he doesn't cast judgment.
Censorship is a strong thread both at a national and a personal level. Off-the -record, Clare told Sam she imagined a doppelganger named Clara stood at her shoulder as she wrote, forcing her to change every wayward word and punctuation mark. It got to the point where she was no longer sure how much of Clara took over.
Does it make a difference here that Flanery is a scholar of literature and has only experienced South Africa in small doses? Will his portrait of apartheid ring true to those who have lived through it?
While the flavour of place might not necessarily hit the mark, the bigger issues do.
This is a novel that examines the way violence, resistance, subversion and complicity eat away at daily life, and the way the search for knowledge and absolution is unbearably difficult.
When the young boy discovered Clare's books, he discovered "whole floors and staircases and wings of space that were at once in keeping with the architecture of the small house he knew, but at that same time made it something else altogether". This is true, too, for Absolution. It is a timely read.
Paula Green is an Auckland poet and children's author.
