An Instant In The Wind

André Brink
An Instant In The Wind.
London, 2000, Vintage.
074939921X

In the mid 18th century, two people attempt to reach the South African Cape from the unmapped interior: Elisabeth Larsson, a young white widow, and Adam Mantoor, an escaped slave. She needs his physical survival skills; he, after years of banishment, needs her company for his own psychological survival. As they struggle against heat and cold, storm and drought, predators and hunger, their initial antagonism gives way to a human relationship on equal terms; then mutates again.

André Brink used to write of apartheid; now he has moved to the wider mental landscapes of which it is part. This is a powerful study of how racism operates in the human psyche.