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Book review: Marie, by H Rider Haggard
Wednesday, April 17th, 2013 09:09 pm(Contains spoilers, but not for anything not internally given away early in the book.)
I've been meaning to read some H Rider Haggard since reading Misery by Stephen King, which makes reference to She and possibly King Solomon's Mines. A while ago a comment of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
carandol's on a blog post of papersky's made me put Marie onto my reading list, and my impending visit to South Africa five years later made me push it to the top of the pile. I'm glad now I read it before I went.
Marie tells the story of the youth of the Allan Quatermain of the above novels, of how he falls in love with his classmate Marie Marais and, after saving her life, incurs the enmity of her cousin Hernando Pereira, only for Marie and Allan to be sundered because Marie's father, a Boer of French Huguenot ancestry, hates the British with a passion.
The story takes place against a rich historical background, documenting events fundamental to the history of South Africa, of which I had previously had no knowledge. In 1836, a number of Boers, dismayed at their discriminatory treatment under British rule, decide to depart in what became known as the Great Trek, and set up their own Boer republics outside of British rule.
The leader of these is Piet Retief, whom we meet as a character in the novel first in a shooting contest between Quatermain and Pereira; later, after Quatermain has gone north to rescue the Maraises from their desperate situation, we see firsthand how Retief's attempt to buy land for the Boers from the Zulu king Dingaan leads to the Boers' betrayal and massacre by Dingaan's warriors.
As a result of my reading this, I found everything pertaining to this period of history much more meaningful when I visited the Voortrekker Monument, built outside Pretoria to commemorate the centenary of the Great Trek. There I saw articles belonging to Piet Retief, and there too (a copy of) the peace treaty written up by Retief and signed by Dingaan just moments before he gave the order "Kill them all!"
I have no idea how accurate the portrayal of everyone in the novel is; regardless of the answer, I felt I knew these people by the time I saw such artefacts in the Monument, and it made them particularly meaningful to me. At any rate, I found the novel to be reasonably sympathetic to everyone—British, Boers, Bushmen (referred to by their historical name Hottentots) and other indigenous natives—with the notable exceptions of a Frenchman named Leblanc, and Dingaan, who is portrayed as monster, an absolute monarch with the power of life and death over everyone within his domain, who is not afraid to abuse that power to the fullest. (However, there is at least one Zulu in the novel—Naya—who is portrayed sympathetically.)
What makes me wonder is to what extent, despite the sympathetic portrayal of the Boers, the foundations of apartheid were already laid then, over a century before the Nationalist Party came to power and completed the legal consolidation of apartheid. Amongst the Trekboers' complaints against British rule, as listed in a document drawn up by Retief, which was displayed in the Monument (but not, I think, mentioned in the novel) was that the British had outlawed slavery and not recompensed Boer slaveholders appropriately. (That said, Retief does go on to promise the Trekboers will not reinstitute slavery once out of the Cape Colony.) And afterwards, discrimination against the blacks was always greater in the Boer republics than in the Cape Colony. (It was not until a couple of decades after the union of the Boer republics with the Cape Colony in 1910 that the Cape blacks finally lost their limited rights.) As film footage, in the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, of the Voortrekker Monument's opening brought out, Afrikaners venerate the memory of the Great Trek with an almost religious devotion, and in a way that brought to mind other, less pleasant, extreme forms of nationalism in the 1930s and sullied, perhaps, the associations the Voortrekkers had for me.
At any rate, I recommend the novel for anyone who wants to learn more about this period of South African history wrapped up in the form of a combined romance and adventure story, and shall have to read She and King Solomon's Mines myself now.
I've been meaning to read some H Rider Haggard since reading Misery by Stephen King, which makes reference to She and possibly King Solomon's Mines. A while ago a comment of
carandol's on a blog post of papersky's made me put Marie onto my reading list, and my impending visit to South Africa five years later made me push it to the top of the pile. I'm glad now I read it before I went.Marie tells the story of the youth of the Allan Quatermain of the above novels, of how he falls in love with his classmate Marie Marais and, after saving her life, incurs the enmity of her cousin Hernando Pereira, only for Marie and Allan to be sundered because Marie's father, a Boer of French Huguenot ancestry, hates the British with a passion.
The story takes place against a rich historical background, documenting events fundamental to the history of South Africa, of which I had previously had no knowledge. In 1836, a number of Boers, dismayed at their discriminatory treatment under British rule, decide to depart in what became known as the Great Trek, and set up their own Boer republics outside of British rule.
The leader of these is Piet Retief, whom we meet as a character in the novel first in a shooting contest between Quatermain and Pereira; later, after Quatermain has gone north to rescue the Maraises from their desperate situation, we see firsthand how Retief's attempt to buy land for the Boers from the Zulu king Dingaan leads to the Boers' betrayal and massacre by Dingaan's warriors.
As a result of my reading this, I found everything pertaining to this period of history much more meaningful when I visited the Voortrekker Monument, built outside Pretoria to commemorate the centenary of the Great Trek. There I saw articles belonging to Piet Retief, and there too (a copy of) the peace treaty written up by Retief and signed by Dingaan just moments before he gave the order "Kill them all!"
I have no idea how accurate the portrayal of everyone in the novel is; regardless of the answer, I felt I knew these people by the time I saw such artefacts in the Monument, and it made them particularly meaningful to me. At any rate, I found the novel to be reasonably sympathetic to everyone—British, Boers, Bushmen (referred to by their historical name Hottentots) and other indigenous natives—with the notable exceptions of a Frenchman named Leblanc, and Dingaan, who is portrayed as monster, an absolute monarch with the power of life and death over everyone within his domain, who is not afraid to abuse that power to the fullest. (However, there is at least one Zulu in the novel—Naya—who is portrayed sympathetically.)
What makes me wonder is to what extent, despite the sympathetic portrayal of the Boers, the foundations of apartheid were already laid then, over a century before the Nationalist Party came to power and completed the legal consolidation of apartheid. Amongst the Trekboers' complaints against British rule, as listed in a document drawn up by Retief, which was displayed in the Monument (but not, I think, mentioned in the novel) was that the British had outlawed slavery and not recompensed Boer slaveholders appropriately. (That said, Retief does go on to promise the Trekboers will not reinstitute slavery once out of the Cape Colony.) And afterwards, discrimination against the blacks was always greater in the Boer republics than in the Cape Colony. (It was not until a couple of decades after the union of the Boer republics with the Cape Colony in 1910 that the Cape blacks finally lost their limited rights.) As film footage, in the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, of the Voortrekker Monument's opening brought out, Afrikaners venerate the memory of the Great Trek with an almost religious devotion, and in a way that brought to mind other, less pleasant, extreme forms of nationalism in the 1930s and sullied, perhaps, the associations the Voortrekkers had for me.
At any rate, I recommend the novel for anyone who wants to learn more about this period of South African history wrapped up in the form of a combined romance and adventure story, and shall have to read She and King Solomon's Mines myself now.
