This is a story told against three very different backgrounds: first, the political and social turmoil of South Africa and the imperatives that bring a young man like Brink's Thomas to act as he does; secondly, the specific place of his people, the white Afrikaners, whose rule has led to the conflict that claims him; and thirdly, the nature of the morality that both forbids and condones the taking of life.

Brink is a brilliant storyteller and his moments of pity and terror more than recompense the reader for occasional longueurs containing more background than story, little humor or irony, and—particularly in the last 200 pages or so of historical flashback—a heavy dose of cheap magazine fiction. But since he is seen by many to be so much more than a teller of tales, it is against these three backgrounds that we must judge Brink. Is his book, as the publicity blurb intones, "a profound meditation on the ethics of violence", and, in the marmoreal phrase of the London Times, "deeply honoring the profession of literature"? His interpretation of the South African scene is memorable, at times penetrating. Thomas, a young white press photographer, exhibits his pictures abroad, exposing the brutal oppression his people have inflicted on the racial underdogs, one of whom recruits him to their freedom movement. He is ordered, with others, to kill the head of state. The president escapes the bomb blast but six bystanders are killed. In the subsequent manhunt Thomas's lover is shot down by police. He takes up with another woman, while his comrades try to organize his escape. Betrayed by both his brother and the father of his second love, Thomas makes it to the border, where he shoots the young woman to save her from the security police. Minus one hand, Thomas ends up with the freedom movement in exile, asking, "Have I sacrificed all this—my life, many lives, your life—in vain?" He finds no answer except "It has to be remembered."

Tellingly, Brink juxtaposes the die-hard older men of apartheid with the sleek young Afrikaner business and professional community, both almost equally hostile to revolutionaries like Thomas and his two women-friends—children respectively of a school-master, a judge, and a minister of religion (three most honored position in old Afrikanerdom). Picturing a society that has fought its way from the disaster of defeat in the Anglo-Boer War in 1902, through poor-whiteism in the early 1930s to forty years of hegemony, he hides no warts in the portrayal of this final phase, taking place on the eve of Nelson Mandela's release from jail and the start of negotiations towards a democratic future. Afrikaners, in Brink's vision, have inflicted on the Africans an oppression and denial of humanity which far exceeds their own experience of British imperialism.

The gradual awakening of Thomas to the horrors of racial supremacy is powerfully conveyed, as is his disillusion at the mythical in his people's history. He writes off its centerpiece, the Great Trek—that much-vaunted movement north during the late 1830s—as a chaotic flight from responsibility and the hardships of the frontier. He seeks out friends, even father figures, among the Africans, seen by most Afrikaners as their natural enemies. He carries his loyalty to a new South Africa (which knows no racial divisions) to the point of committing an act of terror against Afrikaner rule, taking the lives of six human beings. Yet, in a sense, Thomas remains firmly embedded in his Afrikaner culture, unceasingly conscious of the thirteen generations of his Boer forebears and still clinging to some myths of the past. Those final 200 pages chronicling the family history reveal that Thomas—and, perhaps, Brink—is hypnotized by an Afrikaner past peopled by a cast of supermen and super-women unparalleled since the Norse sagas.

Perhaps one should allow Brink his Days of the Giants fantasy, and be thankful that like Thomas, he has turned his back upon exclusivist, wounded-pride nationalism, and his people's greed and cruelty toward their black countrymen. But this is not the stuff of "profound meditation," nor does it "honor the profession of literature," except as a work of commitment in a time of literary nihilism and postmodernist self-indulgence. Thomas's explanation of his willingness to kill does not go much beyond a clumsily expressed claim that the end justifies the means. The whole argument is within the terms of the South African situation, and at times it seems that the heroic character of Sipho, Thomas's mentor in the freedom movement, and Sipho's martyred wife Noni, is all the argument Thomas needs for his terrible deed.

As one persuaded of the same arguments thirty years ago, this reviewer can tell André Brink that a more powerful case is needed to justify such force against one's government in an underground movement. He should know few driven to such measures escape bouts of cynicism, even callousness, that sometimes put them on the level of the state functionaries pitted against them. Yet the ethical argument rages continually within and self-doubt plagues all but the psychopathic.

If Brink, in a novel that succeeds on so many levels, fails in his narration of an act of terror and its aftermath, the fault lies in his omission of that other remorseless companion of such an act—fear. The gnawing, constant sickness of fear will be readily recalled by all who have undergone a remotely similar experience. Thomas appears to escape that. Rich, complex and well-crafted, the novel holds the attention despite its length and wide canvas. To students of South African society it tells much about the Afrikaners as they prepare to step down from their long dominance. But it hardly satisfies the blurbwriter's claim of defining the ethics of violence in the greater context of the human condition.