Both Caltrop's Desire and Chirundu are by South African writers, but with that said, we exhaust all points of similarity between the two novels. In fact, despite their shared origin and contemporaneity, the two books could scarcely be less alike. Caltrop's Desire is by a white South African[, Stephen Gray,] while Chirundu is by a black; Caltrop's Desire is set in the colonial era that spans the Boer War to the Second World War, while Chirundu is set for the most part in a post-independent African state; Caltrop's Desire strains after a rather brittle, self-consciously clever satire while Chirundu deftly combines epic, lyrical and tragic elements in a manner that recalls Ngugi's Petals of Blood. And, finally, Caltrop's Desire amounts to little more than a pretentious failure, while Chirundu is a compelling, if slightly uneven, success.

Gray's novel takes the form of a dying man's apologia. John Martin Caltrop, a South African journalist who has lived through, reported and been fundamentally changed by all his country's cataclysmic conflicts from the Matabeleland Campaign of 1896 through the British victory in Benoni in the Second World War, is expiring during election week in 1948. He is departing this life, in fact, precisely at the moment when all the battles he has witnessed will be irrevocably lost as the British colonial age is defeated by Afrikaner apartheid. Like Tolstoy's Ivan Ilych or Browning's Bishop Blougram, Caltrop takes an unblinkered retrospective survey of his life and tries to make some sense of it, tries to determine if it has been worthwhile. As his life ebbs out in a dreary Johannesburg nursing home, he obsessively and at times incoherently reviews his past. The central question the novel poses is: Has history answered or crushed Caltrop's desire?

By his own estimation, Caltrop has been crushed. But one of the many problems in this exasperating novel is that we are never quite clear what it is that Caltrop sought. He narrates his life story as that of an impassioned odyssey, with himself a heroic, lonely questor. Much of the action recounts his one-man trek north from Capetown, bound for Cairo (‘like the Empire-builders’) in the 1890s, and the adventures and characters he encounters before he comes to a halt, marries and settles down in Kimberley. He says of this quest, ‘I was before my time, being a mounted one-man international, in quest of reconciling the nations within me into a greater whole’. Caltrop's identity, then, would seem somehow to be bound up with that of his country. Both are fractured, diffuse and deeply troubled. But the conflicting nations Gray depicts in the novel are incomplete because entirely white: British and Afrikaner. Except for two stereotyped black menials in the nursing home, Caltrop's South Africa is an uncontaminated white preserve. It is impossible, then, for us to believe in the historical veracity of Gray's South Africa, or in the hero-spokesman he has chosen to embody it. Caltrop seems an historical curiosity, a colonial anachronism for whom we can scarcely feel any nostalgia or sympathy.

Nor can we take much interest in the ‘desire’ that is supposed to be the linchpin of his personality and story. Here at the very heart of the novel is its greatest muddle. Various historical figures traipse through Caltrop's Desire, including Kruger, Baden-Powell and Mary Kingsley. But it is in connection with the nineteenth-century South African novelist Olive Schreiner that Caltrop comes as close as he ever does to disclosing his raison d'être. ‘Her desire was as thwarted as mine,’ he says, ‘and by whatever name we called it, I think we were trying merely to be decent South Africans’.

Such is the rather anti-climactic and indefinite claim of Caltrop's deathbed harangue. But even more damning than the feebleness of its message are the terms in which it is couched. Caltrop's Desire is an earnestly experimental novel consisting of disjointed utterances, fragments of memory, pompous observations. Chronology is exploded, causal connections severed, motivation obliterated. In short, it is a difficult novel, which is not a valid criticism per se, but certainly is highly objectionable when the effort the reader must exert goes largely unrewarded. Gray has read his Joyce and Faulkner and perhaps his Barth and Pynchon as well, but to little beneficial effect. Though brief, Caltrop's Desire is a tedious, derivative production, which despite its verbal fireworks remains curiously devoid of life.

Es'kia Mphahlele's Chirundu is another matter altogether. The author of several previous works of fiction and of one of the earliest critical studies of African literature, Mphahlele is a mature as well as gifted writer, and Chirundu is the sort of powerful, ambitious novel one hopes for from an established writer. The book adroitly and sensitively explores the public and private experience of one Chimba Chirundu. It is the history of his rise as an African leader and recounts the subtle stages by which he evolves from a fervent nationalist revolutionary to a power-hungry minister in a new African state, complete with all the standard paraphernalia of his station—the Mercedes, the London tailored suits, the house with the swimming pool. This, of course, is hardly a new story in the African novel. But what makes Chirundu so fascinating is that the familiar tale is told from within, largely from Chirundu's own point of view, so that it becomes a psychological as well as political account.

In addition, Mphahlele is concerned with the private, emotional toll that such a transformation brings in its wake. For Chirundu this means the disintegration of his first marriage, his illegal marriage to a second woman, and the breakdown of his relationship with a beloved nephew. The plot of the novel—the structure upon which all these emotional problems are hung—involves Chirundu's trial on charges of bigamy brought by his first wife, and a transport strike engineered by his nephew against Chirundu, the Minister of Transport and Public Works.

But interwoven with this dominant theme of Chirundu's political and personal development is a cluster of other crucial concerns: the conflict between traditional and western ways of life, personified by Chirundu's two wives (one for the ‘country’ who is loyal, brave, sensitive, and one for the ‘city’ who is sophisticated, materialistic, vacuous), the role of education in contemporary Africa, the breakdown of family bonds, the role of women, and most persistently, the drive for power. Because of Mphahlele's use of first-person narrative and the depth of his characterization, we become very close to Chirundu himself so that his fate, his corruption, seems not only frighteningly believable but also inevitable. In the end, he appears a figure of almost Shakespearian proportions, and our response to him is close to the classic one of fear and pity.

It is through his technical assurance and dexterity that Mphahlele is able to bring off his ambitious conception. The novel consists of three extended first-person narratives—Chirundu's, his first wife's, and his nephew's—interspersed with dramatic scenes of dialogue spoken by secondary characters. This complicated use of point of view is made even more complex by Mphahlele's treatment of time. The novel is narrated from a ‘present’ of April 1969—during Chirundu's bigamy trial—but the three first-person narratives move backward and forward in time so that we have a vivid picture of how and why things have reached the political and personal crisis at the heart of the novel.

There is only one way in which Mphahlele's control of the story falters and that is in his rather awkward and heavy-handed use of python symbolism. From the earliest pages of the book, Chirundu is insistently associated with the ‘nsato’ or python which crushes his victims to death. The python image fails to function as the objective correlative Mphahlele intended and instead is a useless gilding of the lily, distracting rather than illuminating. The python is trotted out at every conceivable moment and we too clearly see Mphahlele gesturing in the wings on behalf of his symbol, unnecessarily apprehensive that we shall miss his point.

But the creaking of the python is the only major flaw in this impressive and deeply moving novel. And at the very end, on the last page, the symbol suddenly springs to life. Like a dangerous caged snake, Chirundu is jailed after he is convicted of bigamy—of breaking the marriage law of the western way of life that he in all other respects so slavishly imitates. Chirundu, however, is only temporarily constrained—not vanquished. As one of the minor characters observes of Chirundu and his kind, ‘What bothers me is that they never let go once they have tasted power’.

Caltrop's death certificate reads ‘Cause of Death: Despair’. Mphahlele's conclusion to Chirundu is equally bleak. The crucial difference between the two novels is that we are unmoved by Caltrop's death and unconvinced of his world. But we are frightened by Chirundu's promised survival, and Chirundu's world is the same one we live in and see all around us, a world from which Mphahlele so eloquently shows us there is no deliverance.