Anthony Egan Reviews Daddy’s Girl by Margie Orford and Refuge by Andrew Brown

November 9th, 2009 by Ben - Editor

Verdict: carrots

The two reviews by Anthony Egan that appeared in the Mail & Guardian this week have been posted together online. This is not inappropriate, for Margie Orford (Daddy’s Girl) and Andrew Brown (Refuge) are loosely associated in the mind of many an SA Lit reader, not least for their inter-book character borrowings. In fact, Orford’s upped the stakes this time round, and put Brown himself in Daddy’s Girl (he appears on page 113).

Egan awards each book a carrot:

Margie Orford is to Cape Town what Val McDermid is to the north of England, capturing the seamier side of the Mother City: drugs, prostitution, gangs, police corruption and the clash between policing and political correctness. It is not a vision the Western Cape Tourism Board would like to share with prospective domestic and overseas tourists, yet — given the statistics we know — it is part of the city reality as much as Table Mountain and the wine route.
[...]
Andrew Brown is probably one of the best of the new generation of South African writers. His earlier work, Coldsleep Lullaby, combining social commentary with classical detective fiction motifs, deservedly won awards. Street Blues, his grim and gritty memoir about being a police reservist in Cape Town, was also a fine work that offered many insights into the dilemmas of crime and policing in contemporary South Africa.
His new novel — in some ways a crime novel with social commentary — seems a portion of what one can only suspect is a sort of literary project on the author’s part: a critical yet compassionate investigation of contemporary South African life.