New from Jacana: The Book of War

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Title: The Book of War
Author: James Whyle
Publisher: Jacana
ISBN: 9781431403479
Price: R150.00
Available in April 2012

James Whyle takes on the war genre with an eloquent narrative and a command of language and style that  captures the fragility and bleakness of the time. There is no doubt that Whyle is a masterful storyteller.

The Book of War tells the story of a boy who comes to manhood in a war.

William Kentridge has called it, “a rare feast”, and Rian Malan, “a very good book, possibly great.”

An illiterate European child is stranded on the southern tip of Africa. The British and the Xhosa have been spilling each other’s blood for eighty years and the kid signs up for the conflict in the hope of steady meals and a few shillings a month.

The kid’s new commander, The Captain, is hardly more than a boy himself, but he has money and education behind him. His goal is to prove that the revolutionary Minié Rifle is the most effective killing machine available to the British Empire. His instruments are an assortment of convicts, sailors and drunkards culled from the port at the Cape of Good Hope; his adversary, a strategically brilliant Xhosa general with little left to lose.

The Captain and the irregulars depart on a journey towards a grotesque dénouement around a copper vat on the slopes of Mount Misery. They move through a landscape prowled by wild beasts, a landscape so savage that the mountains themselves are like “ancient artefacts whose listed purpose is slaughter”. As they travel, the distinction between man and animal becomes increasingly blurred.

Although it is based closely on first-hand accounts of the 8th Xhosa War, the book creates the effect of an intense defamiliarisation of a history educated South Africans will believe themselves to be au fait with. It converts the bare facts of times past into something terrible and strange. Anyone who has asked themselves why South Africa is a violent country will find a disturbing answer in The Book of War.

James Whyle grew up in the Amatole Mountains of the Eastern Cape. Conscripted into the apartheid army, he was discharged on the grounds of insanity. He did everything in his power to assist the authorities in arriving at this diagnosis. His play about the experience, National Madness, has been called “a simple, subtle and frequently satirical portrait of the condition of militarism”. It was performed at the Market and Baxter theatres and published in Market Plays.

Whyle has published poetry, short stories and journalism. His radio dramas, commissioned by the BBC, include A Man Called Rejoice which was published as Rejoice Burning in the UK in New South African Plays. His screenplay for the film Otelo Burning has been nominated for achievement in screenplay by the Africa Movie Academy Awards. His story, The Story, was chosen by JM Coetzee as winner of the 2011 Pen/Studzinski competition.

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Click here to hear James Whyle reading from The Book of War.

 

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