Wednesday, May 7, 2014

"Haunting" Oprah Magazine reviews Walk

It is 1782, and the 729-ton Grosvenor has run aground on the coast of Pondoland. So begins James Whyle’s second novel, Walk (Jacana), so titled for the trek the castaways undertake, by foot, to reach the Cape Colony. This representation of William Hubberly’s journey is a searing tale of paralysing thirst, gut-wrenching hunger and, ultimately, survival. Diary-style entries record the survivors’ struggles as they split into two groups and journey along the treacherous coastline. Each morning the characters "fire their brands and depart before dawn," feeding on limpets and crabs, seeking shelter in dunes and hiding from wild beasts as the day progresses. Whyle's tone is almost meditative, quietly descriptive, taking on a rhythmic quality and capturing the violent monotony of each day as the characters come closer to their destination – or, death.

Read the full review here.

Thursday, March 20, 2014

Not a read you will soon forget.

This interface of white people and the Xhosa seems to be Whyle’s current and enduring fascination, and he renders it pared down to the essentials, in measured and beautiful prose.
Original sources of diaries, reports and other documents are used to underpin a fictional realisation of events, some real and some imagined. Set in pristine paradise, it is not a read you will soon forget.
This small gem deserves a place on the bookshelves of serious readers; a cherished fragment, unpretentious and incomplete, it creates an enduring set of images...

Jane Rosenthal in the Mail and Guardian.

Monday, February 3, 2014

"Strangers in a strange land". Darrel Bristow-Bovey reviews Walk

In other hands these encounters between Europe and Africa would be lousy with meaning and allegory and retrospective wisdom, but there are no morals here. Everything is an inexplicable sequence of often terrible events without cause and effect, the way life can be. Things just happen, one after the other like feet walking, and the sand and salt scour away symbolism and significance until what's left is a brutal poetry of indifference, another verse of a violent song of a violent land, neither consoling nor too pessimistic.
Whyle's writing is lean and spare - a much abused phrase when describing male South African prose stylists - but it generates hard beauty: "They were weak and very thin, like assemblies of driftwood draped in tattered cloth and knocked about by the wind, jerking puppet mendicants on a fine firm sandy beach in the rain. Each one carrying fire."

Read  whole review here