Despite taking place in South Africa during the 1960s, the latest from Heyns (The Reluctant Passenger
) treats the looming presence of apartheid cursorily, choosing instead to focus on the subtler conflict between the elite English and the much-despised Afrikaners. At Wesley College, an English-speaking boarding school, Simon, the teenage son of an English magistrate father and an Afrikaner mother, keeps quiet about his mixed ethnicity, but is forced to confront his past when a group of Afrikaner students from a nearby technical school arrive at Wesley for a tennis match and Simon recognizes Fanie van den Bergh, a primary school classmate. The book then alternates between the fated day of the tennis match and memories from Simon's childhood. All of these recollections chronicle Simon's attempt to establish his own sense of morality in the face of the racist conservatism of the adult world, but while the book successfully unveils the moral hypocrisy of the era, Simon's recollections lack the coherence needed to transform the mundane adolescent experience—sexual discoveries, troublesome friends, forging an identity—into a compelling story. (Aug.)
