Synopses & Reviews
Red Sky, Red Dust is the story of a young girl growing up with her eccentric family of South African Indian refugees living in exile in Lesotho. Very subjective and involving, the novel immediately and intensely draws the reader into the point of view of the girl and her life. The writing is poetic and powerful, with easy natural imagery and description, and it never falters. Added to the beauty of this writing, there's a subtle, pervasive humour in the tone and the characters, in the point of view of the girl herself. Added to and intermingled with the humour is a ubiquitous magic. Not quite real magic, but events seen through the eyes of someone who believes in magic, in the reality of witchcraft and visions and dreams. This is so well done, it's such a part of the protagonists's world view, that the novel almost, but not quite, crosses over into magic realism.
The language is beautiful, the plot meandering but rivetting, the characters vivid, edgy and humorous, full of life and eccentric energy, sexual and otherwise. It is partly about South Africa's fight for freedom, political but never didactic and never other than profoundly personal. We're taken into the story of a young girl's coming of age with a bad-tempered artist for a mother; M'e Jane (who may be a housekeeper or a maid, it's never made clear) who teaches her secrets about magic, a sophomoric step-father who supposedly drowns but shows up again after her brother is arrested.
Synopsis
The story of a young Southeast Asian girl's life with her eccentric blended family in Lesotho, and her search for the truth about her absent father, is a parable for the country's own quest for freedom and maturity.Red Dust, Red Sky is set in southern Africa during the time of official apartheid. A family originally from India lives in exile in the mountainous kingdom of Lesotho, a tiny country entirely surrounded by South Africa itself. The aftermath of the murder of a student activist at the hands of the South African police - betrayal, the struggle for redemption and years of life underground - is the basis for this powerful story. The language is beautiful, the plot riveting, the characters vivid, edgy and humorous, full of life and eccentric energy, sexual and otherwise. The story is told by Kokoanyana, a girl growing up in the small and closed belief system of rural Lesotho. She is obsessed with discovering the story of her lost father, but the many lies her mother tells her to avoid the potentially dangerous truth has sensitized Koko to the many lies and delusions of the adults around her. This is a world of concealed facts, obscure events, and phenomena only explicable in terms of the ancestors, Shiva, and the South African Defence Force. Kokoanyana's persistent pursuit gradually unearths pieces of the puzzle. But as the family's political history reveals itself, the soldiers advance.