James Murphy's Reviews > Absolution

Near the end of Patrick Flanery's novel Absolution is a short discourse on the inability of history to tell all the stories and about the truth that memory always tells. The two points are at the heart of Flanery's complex novel. It's a novel about modern South Africa set a dozen years ago when the Truth and Reonciliation Commission was working hard at damage control after the long, hard years of apartheid. But it's one in which racial injustices aren't the focus. The narrative follows, instead, the revelations and confession of wrongs within a family. Though the racial issue smoulders in the background, South Africa isn't seen through its prism but rather through the hellishness of its criminal activity, robberies, killings, home invasions, and the general danger of city streets. Every home has become a fortress of walls, double gates, and security devices, including panic buttons in every room. It's a bleak, frightening portrait of the country. The menace and impersonality of the state Flanery writes about recalls Kafka.

Clare, one of the central characters, is writing a fictionalized memoir telling about her unforgivable betrayal of family members in the past. Sam, an academic, is writing a biography of Clare and remembering disturbing events loosely connected to hers. How Flanery brings these two strands together, two characters achieving absolution through confession and realizations of love while frenzied crime and fear swirl outside, threatening to spill over walls and in doors, is the novel's core.

It's a well-written novel, tightly structured and controlled. One hiccup of objection: it's a novel of dialogue, discussion, confession and quiet disagreement behind and between walls, thick protective walls of stucco making compounds around houses, blank walls within the house, and sometimes the stark characters tend to lose their energy and to blend into the stark walls. But it's a tiny thing in a first novel otherwise nicely done.