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Title: Absolution

Author: Patrick Flanery

Narrator: Janet Suzman, Patrick Doherty

Format: Unabridged

Length: 13 hrs and 10 mins

Language: English

Release date: 03-09-17

Publisher: Whole Story Audiobooks

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

A début of extraordinary strength and power, Absolution shines a light on contemporary South Africa and the long dark shadow of Apartheid. In her lush garden on the Western Cape, Clare Wald, world-renowned author, takes up her pen and confronts her life. Ambitious young writer Sam Leroux has returned to South Africa to write Clare's biography. But how honest is she prepared to be? Was she complicit in crimes lurking in South Africa's past; is she an accomplice or a victim? As Sam and Clare turn over the events of her life, she begins to seek reconciliation, absolution. But in the stories she weaves and the truth just below the surface of her shimmering prose, lie Sam's own ghosts.

Critic Reviews:

"A rare combination of...literary triumph...Utterly captivating." (Steven Galloway)

Members Reviews:

Ambitious and assured debut novel

I find myself somewhere between the two leading reviews . Yes, it is a wonderfully textured novel, bnringing to life a large cast with skill and assurance. Flanery is also a very good recorder of space - as a South Afriican, I could not fault him on locations I know well. And he does more than record - he registers the feel of the place acccurately and sensitively . I suspect that most South Africans will feel, as I did, that the obsession with security is rather overdone in the novel - but then, perhaps we have just become used to a situation that must strike an outsider as bizarre.

There can be no doubt that Flanery has the makings of a very good novelist. But where I agree with Sid Nuncius is that it all does rather go on and on, with the result that instead of working up to a climax (I understand that a resolution is too much to hope for in this post-modern age) the novel just unwinds, leaving the reader - this reader- rather unmoved and incurious. The long sessions between Clare and her son, in particular, seem a somewhat unprofitable mulling-over of stale material. A shorter way of saying this is that the novel is simply too long, and tries, in the manner of first novels, to include too much.. Also, I 'm not sure -and I really do mean that I am not sure - that the elaborate four-strand structure adds enough to the novel to justify the effort on the reader's part, not to mention the writer's part.

I read the novel with interest and enjoyment, straight after Gordimer's "No Time Like the Present", with which it has a lot in common. To read the two in conjunction is fascinating - the youthful excess and care of the one, the haughty disregard of the niceties of style and punctuation of the other. In a way, it is sad to have to report that the young upstart is a far better read than the old pro.

Well-written but dragged on too long in the end

This book about South Africa spans the present and the past, interweaving the story of what might have happened to Laura, a young South African anti-apartheid activist 20 years ago, with the story of her mother, Clare, as she remembers the past. Clare is a well-known and aging novelist, who I would argue is drawn to resemble Nadine Gordimer. She has almost completely withdrawn from public life and battles with her past and how she might have been complicit in certain events. She has suffered not only the unexplained disappearance of Laura but also the loss of her own sister who was brutally murdered together with her husband.