A world torn apart by violence

DEVIL’S HARVEST Andrew Brown

Zebra Press THE WORLD first conjured up in Andrew Brown’s latest novel is one of impending doom that ends in an explosion of hideous violence.

Alek, a young girl, ceases what she is doing as the sound of death comes closer and closer, as the demons are unleashed. Welcome to Northern Bahr el Ghazal in South Sudan.

The depiction of a world torn apart by fire and violence in the prologue to Devil’s Harvest then gives way in a seamlessly jarring manner –a tricky literary device to pull off – as Brown takes his reader to the sedate university town of Bristol where Associate Professor Gabriel Cockburn is on his way to his job as a botany lecturer when violence collides with his world.

For him, however, it is the sedate violence of a bump by a car after buying a morning cup of coffee.

Cockburn is the epitome of British academia, right down to the peg clipping his trousers together as he cycles past a bunch of students protesting against the use of drones on foreign soil.

It’s supposed to be an ordinary day for this man on the cusp of confirming a new plant, which just happens to be in the dangerous north of South Sudan.

Flip a switch and the reader is in a military base where a team is analysing a strike hit of a drone somewhere in Africa. Air Marshall George Bartholomew feels he is involved in things that are beyond his control and is terrified of the consequences of the work he is doing, though he is more petrified of what would happen if he stopped servicing a private “client”.

In all three of these introductions Brown shows the remarkable talent he has displayed in his previous novels for creating characters that linger in the mind long after the book’s been put down.

The net of tension and fear that is about to envelop every single person in Devil’s Harvest is located at first in Bartholomew’s gut. There is Alek’s terror and stoicism, and Gabriel’s initial irritation which flares into fear and then unbearable grief.

And there are the scars that shift and turn in the land, in a world from which all goodness seems to have fled.

Gabriel has a lecture to give, one where the GMO hecklers will pitch up, but where he will speak about an amazing discovery which involves the management of iron homeostasis in plants, a discovery that needs to be confirmed by a site visit to the godforsaken Sudan, but which is right on the cutting edge of new research in botany, or as Gabriel refers to it “one of the central battlegrounds of the new research in botany”.

Cleverly Brown brings us to one of the central themes of the novel which is about the battle for land, for possession. It is also the battle for human decency and kindness, as a friendship begins between a mild professor and a young woman who has walked through fire.

Gabriel meets a strange man at the dinner following his lecture on his rare discovery which he has yet to see in the field. Ismail invites him to come to South Sudan and promises him access to the plant, but it is clear from the start that there are swirling

‘Devil’s Harvest’ is intelligent and compelling. A rich story of frightening brutality.

agendas at play.

These flow over to the professor’s relationship with his attractive yet chilly wife who just happens to work for the defence force in a civilian but senior job.

This is a rich story of frightening brutality and great humanity.

Brown has the benefit of being an advocate who knows Africa well.

His book Inyenzi about the Rwandan Genocide was widely hailed, as have been his crime novels Coldsleep Lullaby, Refuge, and Solace, remain, for me, some of the finest crime novels any South African has ever written.

He also knows the Sudan, so many of the places he describes in the war-torn hellhole of Juba will be recognisable to those who have visited.

Because, as Gabriel swiftly finds out on his journey towards homeostasis – whether personal or botanical – there will be collateral damage along the way, and there will always be people who are trying to swing the pendulum of favour in their own direction.

Brown tears open the belly of the international arms trade, of collateral damage and of the threat to peace wherever there is money to be made.

Devil’s Harvest is intelligent and compelling reading in

Crocker is a former Cape Times books editor.