Heaven forbid: A novel

By Christopher Hope

Book Overview

Revised This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0333724658
• ISBN13: 9780333724651
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: Macmillan
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 1.1" x 5.3"

Customer Reviews

paradise lost

The opener "When I was about five, I used to lie in bed and think about my past.." told me I was in for a somewhat comical and highly personal journey. This captivating `memoir', told through the eyes of five-year-old Martin Donnally, is set in his grandfather's house, the "Villa Vanilla", in particular in `his' garden, in 1948, the year that "Our Lot" (the relatively `liberal' Jan Smuts) lost the general (only whites voted) election and the "New Lot" (the Nats) won, and the year his mother "left him" for another man, evokes the world of a five-year-old with humour and insight - his larger-than-life, eccentric Irish Catholic extended family: Grandpa who sings and races horses; chain smoking ascerbic 'excommunicated' Auntie Fee, who sides with the ogres in fairy tales and who makes up her own heroic stories about Martin's dead father; and most of all, Georgie, the Zulu servant and Martin's `nannie' and confidant. But into this world arrives dour, racist, Presbytarian, cruel Gordon, his mother's husband-to-be. The hints are there from the beginning of the imminent disintegration of Martin's seemingly timeless and Edenic world: "I was at home in the garden , but the garden wasn't my home". The novel resonated especially for me, having grown up in Johannesburg in the same period. In an interview Hope described his novel as "not a view from the top down, but from knee-height up", admitting its autobiographical nature, his mixing of his childhood memory with family history, with a crucial moment in South Africa's history and "a bit of poetic licence". Readers will enjoy its piognant blend of humour and its sense of imminent seismic and irrevocable change.