Patrick Flanery's first novel, Absolution, asks a modest familiarity with South Africa's history of racial, ethnic and political strife to appreciate the nuances of paranoia and deception that drive the characters' search for understanding. In exchange, this ambitious, multilayered novel rewards the reader with insights into memory and the tricks its plays to carry us over the hurdles of our past mistakes.
Clare Wald is an aging, successful writer finishing a new memoir disguised as a novel ("the irony of the imagined and the real grating against each other"), through which she explores the fate of her politically active daughter who disappeared at the height of the overthrow of apartheid. She has agreed to allow Sam Leroux, an aspiring young author recently returned to Johannesburg from New York, to write her official biography. This setup is clearly reminiscent of the bitter dispute between Nadine Gordimer and her once "authorized," then "de-authorized," biographer, Roland Suresh Roberts; indeed, their dispute showed the same political complexity portrayed so well in Absolution. But in Flanery's narrative, the bond between Clare and Sam strengthens as the biography unfolds--revealing a mosaic of desperate confession in search of absolution couched in a language of ambiguity and circumspection.
Flanery's themes have a universal component as well: South Africa is a country of settlers, including the Bantu and Zulu, the Dutch and British, and Indians and Pakistanis. Ethnic and racial frictions led to years of war and violence. In the course of unraveling the personal histories of Clare and Sam, Absolution forces us to confront questions of our own willingness to resist injustice--or do as Clare has done, hide our opinions in fiction and veiled autobiography. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.