Ladysmith Book

In the dying days of the 19th century, the world's eyes turned to the small South African town of Ladysmith, whose inhabitants spent 118 days under siege from Boer forces, waiting for General Buller's relief forces. Giles Foden tells Ladysmith's story through a host of characters. There's the Irish hotelier Leo Kiernan and his daughters Bella and Jane; the barber Antonio Torres, from Portuguese East Africa; the various British war correspondents, including a young Winston Churchill; the Indian stretcher bearers, among them Mohandas Ghandi; a Zulu named Muhle Maseku, his wife Nandi and son Wellington; and two young English soldiers, Tom and Perry Barnes, whose letters home were apparently inspired by those of Foden's great- grandfather. It's a busy book, and it's not always clear what's going on. But that's Foden's point. At heart Ladysmith is a novel about the writing of history, set on the verge of modernity, where old ways of assessing historical truth were being cruelly questioned. So correspondent George Steevens still reads his Greek historians and Gibbons, while messages are being sent(and censored) by the new-fangled heliograph. "Sieges are out of date," Steevens realises. "To the man of 1899, with five editions of the evening papers every day, a siege is a thousandfold a hardship. We make it a grievance nowadays if we are a day behind the news--news that concerns us nothing!" With such pressures to provide news, news, news, it's no surprise when the correspondents end up producing the Ladysmith Lyre, full of fake news. And on the margins, there's the unnamed Biographer, eschewing words in favour of visual images with his Biography, but soon finding that he too can't tell the whole story. Foden visits the pitfalls of historical fiction. Like Annie Proulx's Accordion Crimes, there are moments in Ladysmith when research overpowers narrative. Like Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong, Foden's love story convinces far less than his war story. In its attempted range--Churchill and Ghandi's encounter prefiguring events of the 1940s, Bella's personal rebellion standing in for the advance of women, the place of Ireland in Britain's colonial plans, Wellington's experiences informing his work with the ANC-- Ladysmith sometimes falls short. But in his evocation of the town's drawn-out suffering, Foden is very good, producing some startling images such as the mockingbirds who "take to imitating the whine and buzz of shells". This is never anything less than a fascinating, ambitious novel, and to see a young author taking on the huge question of how to write history is inspiring indeed. --Alan StewartRead More