Perhaps all one can really hope for, all I am entitled to, is no more than this: to write it down. To report what I know. So that it will not be possible for any man ever to say again: I knew nothing about it.

Placed at the end of most novels these words would probably sound melodramatic or self-aggrandising or even slyly apologetic ('I'd have liked to have done more but …'). As the last words of André Brink's A Dry White Season, however, they're a quite proper reminder that in certain places at certain times the subtleties we normally demand from fiction seem almost beside the point: all that matters is that the truth be set down, preferably with directness and simplicity. It's not a position we'd expect to be taken by British and American novelists, most of whom feel (perhaps mistakenly) that their societies are stable enough to allow a writer to be as fictive as he or she likes: 'reporting' can best be left to journalists. But there are countries in which no such licence exists: so controlled, censored or corrupt is the press that if novelists won't do the job of reporting then perhaps nobody will. It may be that André Brink exaggerates in implying this about South Africa: through the reporting of Donald Woods, at least, a clear picture has emerged of the brutality of the Security Police in that country. But there are some things which cannot be said too often, and although there's a strong feeling of déjà vu about A Dry White Season (some passages read as if they'd come straight from Woods's Biko) it is still, in parts at least, a book of great power. This power, which comes not from any very special novelistic skill but rather from the urgency of what Brink has to report, has already been paid tribute to by the South African government, which has found it necessary to ban the novel even before its publication….

Brink is no Gordimer or Jacobson, and there are elements in A Dry White Season which jar badly. Principal among these is the introduction of a 'romantic novelist' narrator, who receives Ben's papers just before his death and recounts his story. The presence of this narrator may 'explain' and justify some of the looser writing in the book, notably the at times sentimental treatment of women characters, but little is gained by the device, and the attempt to link the social 'drought' implicit in the title with the narrator's 'dry patch' in writing is a piece of fictive self-consciousness at odds with the novel's overall tone. But when the attention stays with Ben—his dilemma as a white liberal and his increasing sense that South Africa's problems spring less from the malevolence of its security police than from the complacency of its white middle class—then Brink is on firmer ground. Though its subject is South Africa today, A Dry White Season is in many ways an old-fashioned English novel, its hero a 'little man' in the line of Dickens's Stephen Blackpool or Orwell's Winston Smith, its underlying philosophy a liberal humanist one….