African queen: Michael Pye on Dan Sleigh.

ISLANDS

BY DAN SLEIGH 

TRANSLATED BY ANDRE BRINK

NEW YORK: HARCOURT. 768 PAGES, $30.

When South Africans write history, she is simply "famous Eva"; the rest of us hardly know her name. She was the very first victim of the Dutch when they planted their colony at the Cape of Good Hope in the mid-1600s. A woman of the Khoikhoi peoples who followed and tended cattle through the lush Cape valleys, she chose to join up with the European newcomers, learn their language, wear their clothes, be baptized in their church, and marry their surgeon. All her papers were in order, and it killed her.

When her man was cut down while on a slaving mission, Eva found herself stranded between the culture she had abandoned and a culture that did not want her anymore--a castaway in her own house. She turned to drink, and when the Dutch company wouldn't support her anymore, she started to sell herself. Later she died a prisoner on Robben Island, the same place where Nelson Mandela would come to work the slate for so many dusty years.

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As foundation myths go, this is quite astonishing: Eva is a one-woman bill for the wrongs of empire. Still, she's sometimes cited as proof that the Dutch did baptize and marry among the peoples they found already living at the Cape, although she was the only person baptized in a whole century. Her story is supposed to show the virtuous, reasonable side of Afrikaner culture, before the 1940s invention of apartheid made it synonymous with fortified racism.

Even Eva's end--turning tricks in a penal colony, found drowned in a saltwater pond--somehow props up the notion that only whites could make a proper, modern life at the Cape. And yet she's also evidence of how two cultures can live side by side, cogs and gears never meshing, never understanding one another--until one side takes out its guns to settle everything. A battle almost gets lost in Eva's time because Dutch soldiers had reckoned they were due a few extra hours of sleep; it was the Sabbath, they complained, so obviously the locals wouldn't fight.

Islands, Dan Sleigh's first novel, starts with Eva and ends with a half-century of unfamiliar, twisting story: how the Khoikhoi found the Dutch; how the Dutch built their trading station at the Cape into a power; how colonists and herdsmen tended their daily lives, their careers, their dreams. Sleigh takes us from the times when the Cape of Good Hope was the vital way station to the Dutch Eastern colonies, in what is now Indonesia, to the hurricane years that washed away the Dutch East India Company's goods and power.

The novel's scale is ambitious to an old-fashioned fault--nothing less than the story of the rise and fall of one of the seventeenth-century's great trading machines and the way it engineered lives and whole cultures. You can never forget the Company. It's a physical presence at the Cape, its great dark castle always growing, always demanding more lime, more work, more stone; it is the arbitrary puppetmaster of everyone in its territory.

But Sleigh's book is also fine work--scrimshaw, maybe, if you fancy a quick nautical metaphor. We live intimately with a woman stranded between cultures; her loving husband; her children as they grow and marry; her daughter on Mauritius and back at the Cape; and, finally, her grandchildren, who are left back where the family started--for all their rich and complex history, Eva's family end up picking a poor living at the Cape. Readers cut ebony, helm a ship, brew arrack, grow sugar, run a chain gang of prisoners across snowy Europe, and travel among the lilies, lions, and hippos into an Africa entirely unfamiliar to Europeans. But we never lose sight of the point: This land is being stolen as well as changed. The exotic plants, the reeds and lilies, go back to Europe in barrels for study and use.

All the proper stuff of big and romantic historical novels is wonderfully done, including sea battles, storms, hunts, and loves. And there are all the incidental pleasures--women who haunt you, islands you dream about, and even an element of high farce as Company lawyers try to make Africa conform to their bits of paper.

But the language is plain and oddly domestic--seals are plump "like sausages in a pan." Each incident is rooted in a detailed but unself-conscious knowledge that throws up images that live, as when a ship is lost, its bilge pumps clogged with a rich soup of coffee and pepper, or a Khoikhoi hero is saved by a white surgeon--a cliche of every colonial fable--and the cleaning of his wounds reveals a catalogue of the healing techniques of another culture: cow dung, herbs, and bits of sheep's wool.

One of Sleigh's great virtues is that he does not preach, and maybe that's because of his commitment to fact. His version of multiculturalism is to show how things really were: the parallels between European feasts and gifts after Eva's baptism, for example, and what she expects from her own people for her own children when they're born--all are found by the reader without prompting.

This is remarkable for a novel written in Afrikaans about the origins of the Afrikaner national identity. Sleigh doesn't glorify; he has an exact, unforgiving notion of how the adventure of a colony becomes provincial--drink helps; so does stern religion--and how lives in southern Africa could be built only by forcing whole peoples to move either out, as refugees, or in, as slaves. The colonists become settlers and cut their ties with patria; soon the familiar ports of Europe or Indonesia seem as mythical and remote as any rumoured city of gold in Africa.

Sleigh's book is part of a literary renaissance still too unfamiliar to most readers, even to the Dutch, some of whom understand Afrikaans somewhat. Indeed without Andre Brink's sponsorship, and his translation (which manages to be both blunt and elegant), we might never have seen Sleigh's book. After all, it's always been easier to write off Afrikaners--Boers, bigots, brutes--than to listen to their stories.

The Dutch themselves are oddly shocked when reminded by scholars of their slave trade; to them the seventeenth century was all tulips and Rembrandt--maybe Spinoza too, if you really want difficulty. When you tell them that they once, briefly, held Brazil, they look at you in astonishment. Their favorite imperial stories come from Indonesia, and tend to the lushness of Couperus, or semidemisodomy in the tropics. They hardly recognize the brutal, corporate, rigid world of their once-great trading companies. If even the Dutch don't want to know these things, you can see just how brave is Sleigh's project: to resurrect from the past what's buried, not just events and personalities but whole nations. The disinherited Khoikhoi, after all, became the Bushmen, and now they are close to disappearing from the earth; Eva is their past, too. Sleigh inhabits the past, letting it unspool with the inevitability of actual history. His detail is never pretty or reassuring; he keeps us in the moment, not in a museum.

He does so in part by hinting that his story may be the amusement of a learned clerk who's been sidelined in the colony's later days, who has had time to see every scrap of paper that survives, "all the most confidential and personal documents," and who plans to construct his own version in order to denounce the people who sidelined him. He finds, however, that the papers won't follow his orders, won't stay in line with his narrowly vengeful intent, instead choosing a "different battle-field from the one he'd planned."

Sleigh himself is an archive rat, a born researcher. "There is no history other than the analysis and interpretation of documents," he says in his own voice, "a search for survivors in endless space." And Islands is a documented story, a saga brought to life from old ledger entries. "Some of those things the world wouldn't believe, but fortunately every word of it had been written down," as Governor van Riebeeck tells his surgeon. "It was all to be found in the journals."

Anyone who's worked with this kind of material knows very well that facts can strangle a story. But the tension between the record and the story is where fiction is born; when it works, the result is fresh, even alarming. The process of discovering and writing is the organizing principle in what otherwise might be just an easy rush of exotic incidents. In Sleigh's novel, there is no unreliable narrator, which would be dull; but there is a narrative, subject to all the pressures and doubts that face someone making living figures out of old papers. Islands is almost as much about history in general as it is about one specific history.

Sleigh's too subtle--this is an astonishing first novel--to spell all this out. True, he does scatter a few tin-tack sentences in the path of the oncoming reader to the general effect that history repeats itself. But nothing looms and not much fore-shadows anything, which is all the more remarkable in a big book about an entire nation--a book, as Brink has said, to mark South Africa's coming of age.

Michael Pye's most recent novel is The Pieces from Berlin (Knopf, 2003). The film adaptation of his book Taking Lives (Knopf, 1999) was directed by D. J. Caruso. (See Contributors.)