[In the following review of Looking on Darkness Driver comments on the novel's social context and assesses its artistic merits.]

Looking on Darkness is the English translation (by the author himself) of an Afrikaans novel, Kennis van die Aand, which was banned on publication in South Africa: "If this is art", said the clerical Vorster, brother of the Prime Minister, "then a brothel is a Sunday school". It is not difficult to understand why it was banned: it is explicit about sex; it is explicit about torture in South African gaols; it is explicit about racial hatred and persecution, and about the way South Africans actually live and talk and feel; and it largely concerns the (illegal) love affair between a Cape Coloured man and a (white) British girl. According to an Afrikaans saying, "a bird must not shit in its own nest": André Brink has done more than that—he has torn the nest to pieces.

Looking on Darkness is presented as the autobiography of a Cape Coloured actor, Joseph Malan, recounted in a series of extended flashbacks from the cell in which he awaits execution for the murder (committed as part of an unfinished suicide pact) of his white girl-friend, Jessica. We are told that he destroys what he writes as he completes it, which is rather confusing for the reader. He recalls the stories of his ancestors which he heard as a child; looks back on his friendships and loves, his schooling and university, his years in England—at RADA in provincial rep and at the RSC—his decision to go back to his own country and people; reviews his intellectual and dramatic interests, and so on. Public events obtrude: Sharpville and Langa; the deportation of a priest; the suicide of Malan's spiritual mentor, Dulpert Naidoo, while in solitary confinement.

But Malan is primarily an actor, and he works for his people's liberation and his own by forming a company to take on tour. The productions include a rewritten version of Hamlet, SA! (after Peter Brook's US), Andorra a version of Tartuffe: it is one of Brink's skills that he makes these sound both feasible and exciting. The company works well enough to bring down on itself the full weight of the police-state, in all its logical illogicality and crushing pettiness. Gradually Malan is forced back to his own drama, the idyllic and doomed love-affair with Jessica, and finally his present position. His heroism consists in his refusal to make the choices his white masters demand, and by the end of his story he has achieved a kind of freedom.

There are failings in the novel: imaginative credibility slips, the control of the narrating "I" wavers and pity becomes self-pity. The citing of intellectual parallels and authorities is too insistent (though it might be argued that Malan's habit of supporting every thought with a reference is both typical of his actor's mind and a defence against the racialists' cry that all blacks, however educated, remain barbarians). It interests me that Afrikaans writers seem to find it much easier to identify imaginatively with coloured than with black Africans. But within its context this is a brave and important novel, and in any terms a fine one—linguistically exciting, continually perceptive about a society gone mad, fiercely angry about cruelty. Even read safely in exile—midway between contexts—it is very disturbing, partly because of what it has to say about the condition of exile itself, but mainly because it (unfashionably) makes of self-abnegation a convincing ideal. Not that Joseph Malan denies himself experience, but the murder of Jessica is deliberate self-murder, and his decision not to commit suicide is, paradoxically, an act of commitment to the consequences, not simply of his actions, but of his history, his slave-ancestors' history, his refusal to say "baas". Not for nothing is St John of the Cross constantly cited: this is abnegation which moves to ecstasy. "And so I regret nothing. This is love", says Malan on the eve of his execution. "I was never sure whether I'd be able to endure it all, but I have. I haven't betrayed anyone: neither Jessica, nor Jerry, nor my history. This is joy."