BOOK REVIEWS

Air of magical realism in story of a young girl trying to find love

SIENA is running through the night, in the dark Karoo, covered in blood.

This is the beginning of Carol Campbell’s extraordinary novel

The Tortoise Cried Its Only Tear.

Her destination is her old primary school, Seekoegat, where she hopes to find protection for the thing she has done.

Campbell’s previous novels,

My Children Have Faces and Esther’s House, both received critical acclaim and her new novel, set in the harsh landscape of the Karoo, is perhaps even better than her first two novels.

My Children Have Faces told the story of the karretjie people of the Karoo. It was a story about finding identity, but also a story about a dying tradition in the Karoo of those free wanderers who travelled (some still do) by wagons drawn by donkeys.

For Siena the life of being part of a karretjie family is over.

Her beloved Pa, even with his failings, is dead. Her mother has taken to drinking, and Siena has, by a quirk of luck, been sent to Seekoegat by the owner of the farm next to where she and her sister squat. A farm that is run by a drunkard who mistreats his wife, and has not returned to the farm for a long time, leaving Majolo and Ou Ana to run the farm.

At the school Siena finds a degree of love and care, the kindness of ordinary people that gives her hope for a high-school education and a proper job one day.

But, on her return to the location at the holidays, she meets up with two old friends, Boetie, a wild and neglected child, and Kriekie, whose mother leaves him in the town to go to work as a sex worker at the N1 truck stops. The little boy goes to the station every day that he expects her back, but we all know that the day will come when she will not return.

Through weaving the events of a single night as Siena tries to reach safety at her old school – and the people she knows love her – and the story of how this night came to be, Campbell tells the story of the tragedy of poverty and lack of agency of those who have been cut off from access to land and water. Of donkeys that have been sold off, of those who turn to drinking to try to blunt the sorrow of being outliers in their own land.

There is an air of magical realism in this wonderful novel, as an exhausted and terrified Siena pushes herself on and on through the night to where she hopes she will find safe haven. Her dead father appears to her to give advice, she remembers stories of her childhood, and transgressions that have split friendships. This is a tragic book, saved from being depressing by Campbell’s extraordinary way of describing the Karoo and its people, the disposed and the hopeless. It’s about how one piece of paper, one intervention, can change a life.