You Will Be Safe Here by Damian Barr - review by Richard Canning

Richard Canning

A Foot in Both Camps

You Will Be Safe Here

By

Bloomsbury 327pp £16.99
 

‘Write what you know’ is the clichéd advice meted out to many aspiring authors. While Damian Barr’s Eighties memoir Maggie & Me (2013) indicated that the young Scotsman may have taken the suggestion to heart, You Will Be Safe Here, his first novel, sees him change course.

Set in South Africa in different periods, the book teases out unexpected connections between two tragic stories. The first concerns Sarah van der Watt and her son, forcibly evicted from their farm in the Orange Free State by the British during the Second Boer War and detained by them in Bloemfontein in one of the first ever concentration camps. The second deals with the equally terrible rite of passage experienced by Willem, an effeminate, bookish sixteen-year-old Afrikaans boy, in the recent past, when his mother and her fiancé, Jan, decide on a radical path to toughen him up and, implicitly, straighten him out

‘He needs to man up, stand on his own two feet,’ Jan asserts as they drop the boy off at the New Dawn Safari Training Camp. It is one of a handful of men-only redoubts still in existence for hard-right Afrikaans nationalists and members of the disenfranchised white

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

RLF - March

A Mirror - Westend

Follow Literary Review on Twitter