Derek Perkins

A Tale of Love, Alas Derek Perkins

Mr J, blind from birth, tells the story of his life and loves and peculiar friendships among the English colony at the Cape. His method is to imitate the random action of memory, choosing those episodes which reveal most clearly the strange elements of his society and his own eccentric response to them. He begins with a love affair that occupied a large part of his early manhood and distils from it a sad poetry of frustration. This calls to mind its opposite and he recounts his association with a rumbustious Coloured woman, epically large and loud, a reluctant abortionist, foster mother and, eventually, anarchist, dominating the slum in which she lives with her vivid personality.

Against the life of the slums, he contrasts his own privileged upbringing, an only child in the care of his widowed mother and proconsular aunts attempting to impose an Edwardian order on the crude contours of their country life. He discovers in a dramatic incident the deep antagonism existing between Afrikanerdom and the English and, with a handful of friends, lives in increasing isolation from and amazement at the policies of the State. Although they are able to laugh at the ludicrous aspects of apartheid (Emergency Mark IV), one by one they are forced to leave the country. Eventually Mr J takes the same step and tells what it costs him.

David Lytton was born, and spent his first twenty one years, in South Africa. He chose to leave at the fall of the Smuts government, but periodically returned to report on condition there for the BBC. His novels concern different aspects of the South African condition, covering all levels of social life in the country. This audiobook is complementary to the author's The Paradise People, which presented aspects of the Afrikaner way of life, and completes his design of six works each dealing with a different strata in the strange geology of South African society. The style of each is adapted to the idiom and rhythms of the strata it is set in.