Verdict: carrot
The 1960s have had something of a vogue in South African fiction, perhaps because many people currently of novel-writing age had their childhoods in that fraught decade. It was the decade of Sharpeville and the death of Verwoerd, of apartheid triumphant and resistance largely quiescent after the Rivonia trials and the incarceration of Mandela and others. It was also a decade of white complacency, uneasiness over communism and the black majority largely allayed by growing prosperity.
Small Moving Parts offers a wonderful evocation of that decade in all its na239ve insensitivity, observed, as in many novels about the period, through the eyes of a child – in this instance the precocious Halley Murphy. The political subtext is subordinated, as it would have been in a child’s consciousness, to the drudgery and delights of daily life.
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