Hatchet Job of the Day – PHILIDA

Peter Kemp in The Sunday Times didn’t think PHILIDA by André Brink deserved its Man Booker nomination:

Less and less believable as her story proceeds and she converts to Islam before concocting a benign ecumenical theology of her own, Philida becomes a sentimentalised icon of triumphant resistance to enslavement (though, in fact, her protest comes to nothing and she achieves freedom, along with other slaves, only when emancipation is declared in the colony by the British in 1834). Intended to lay bare the atrocity of slavery in South Africa, Brink’s novel merely wraps a woolly muffler around it.

We’re looking forward to the other reviews.

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