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I’m scheduled to sign copies of The New Suffolk Hymnbook at the Jacana stand during the Cape Town Book Fair, on Sunday 17 June at 1pm. Here is the poster Jacana has designed to promote the stint:

by Chris Walton
Published by Jacana.
reviewed by Ben Oswest

This review originally ran, in edited form, in the Sunday Independent. Here’s the link (subscribers only):

• Quick pace and sardonic tone make publisher’s indulgence a romp

And here’s the review in full:

At first glance, this enjoyable Gothic sex farce dolled up as a murder mystery appears to be the product of pure indulgence on its publisher’s part: for what have Zurich, Switzerland and its inhabitants during the years of the First World War to do with South Africa today?

But one of the secret pleasures of Chris Walton’s Sound Bites is lifting evidence from its pages to fit a theory about its implausible release here: the theory that South African culture – the whole shebang, its producers, consumers, bureaucrats and police – has matured to the point where incidental voices singing unfamiliar notes are made room for, because of a general agreement that the local milieu – a milieu shaped mainly by voices more pleasing to those with a nationalist bent – offers everyone some agency, a small ledge on the mossy cliff on which to trill.

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A friend made the dour observation recently that being on the longlist for an award is like waiting for someone to ask you to dance.

Neither she nor I was asked last night when the Sunday Times Fiction Prize longlist was winnowed from twenty-nine to a shortlist of five. The prize, at R75,000, is SA’s largest literary award.

We chaff may take consolation in this image, which I have pilfered from the Times‘ website. It’s the longlist, stacked - a frozen moment of promise.

If I was a literary bookie, meanwhile, I’d place extremely short odds on Marlene van Niekerk and Agaat to take the prize. It’s the thickest book of the bunch, close to the center. (Another friend points out that, in Agaat’s case, a translation is being judged, not an original work in English, which is quite irregular. But then again, SA’s literary politics are much like the real thing, haphazard - and what’s more, he’s on the shortlist.)

• Full Sunday Times fiction shortlist here; and non-fiction shortlist here.

An edited version of the novelist Sheila Roberts’s review of The New Suffolk Hymnbook appeared in The Weekender on Saturday. Here’s the link:

• The New Suffolk Hymnbook reviewed by Sheila Roberts

And here’s the review in full:

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by James Robertson
Penguin/Hamish Hamilton

reviewed by Ben Oswest

An edited version of this review originally appeared in the 12 November 2006 Sunday Independent. Here’s the link for subscribers:

• The Testament of Gideon Mack reviewed by Ben Oswest

Strangely, I can’t find the original text of the review, before it was whittled down for newsprint - but what follows is the piece post the initial bout of whittling, which makes is slightly different from what appeared in the Independent (though still much truncated):

And on the third day he rose again. Gideon Mack, that is: the Scottish minister who set the North Sea hamlet of Monimaskit briefly aflame with scandal when, having fallen into the Keldo Water and been presumed irretrievably drowned for half a week, he miraculously reappeared, claiming it was the Devil himself that had saved him. Further, Auld Nick was now his friend. This is what passes for the premise of James Robertson’s new but rather worn novel, at least, and what’s interesting about it is that it’s laid out in full in the prologue – a sure clue that something’s up.

• Purchase a copy of the novel.

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