Perfectly formed


Mandela Peter Hain SPRUCE, 343PP, £12.99 ■ Tablet Bookshop price £11.70


hy another biography of Nelson Mandela? We have Anthony Sampson’s authorised biography and Mandela’s own Long Walk to Freedom, both monumental and, in their different ways, definitive works, along with many others. Peter Hain answers the question by


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(correctly) stating: “What’s been missing ... is a short, popular and accessible book that tells Mandela’s entire and remarkable story”. But this is something else again. For Hain, a long stay of the Blair and Brown Cabinets, first found fame and (for some) notoriety as an anti-apartheid activist. Born in Kenya, he grew up in South Africa until he came to the UK when his parents were forced into exile for their opposition to the regime. Thus, woven into these pages are asides and occasional anecdotes (Mrs Hain monitored the Rivonia trial for the South


Nelson Mandela. Photo: Reuters


there are two different post-war periods to compare and contrast. The original mystery centred on the disappearance, during an extravagant house party, of an immensely valuable emerald, one of an historic set. Peter had worked out what happened, but now, in 1951, it suddenly becomes important to determine the present whereabouts, ownership and authenticity of the several stones and what actions, including murder, they may have provoked. The mystery and detection aspects of the novel, though scrupulously and cleverly worked out, and enhanced by some curious knowledge about emeralds such as Dorothy Sayers would have enjoyed, are actually the least interesting part of the book. They are too complicated and, anyway, not the real point. What matters are the colour and authenticity, not of the emeralds but of the writing, particularly the dialogue, which does indeed gleam with wit, worldly wisdom and literary jokes. Themes, threads and minor characters from the original books are introduced without undue strain. The story of Peter’s happy marriage to Harriet is continued and further developed as Sayers would certainly


01420 592974


African Liberal Party) that lend colour denied to most others who would write about Mandela. But a short book of 343 pages? Concisely


written, endlessly interesting, attractively produced, it is the excellent illustrations that give the book its bulk. Hain captures well his subject’s character – the humility, the aristocratic poise, his courtesy, his wit, his sense of fun. He shows how Mandela’s gift for reconciliation and compromise and his patience, which forged both democracy and the new South Africa, came from the time for reflection and reading (he taught himself Afrikaans) afforded him by his 27 years of imprisonment, as well as the enforced chance he had to get to know Afrikaaners in those years. The book does not shy away from what


Mandela himself admits – his sorry failure as husband and father (although Winnie Mandela knew early on that she had less married a man than “the struggle”), which was the price he paid for his devotion to his country. Hain charts the creation of the apartheid state; its growing dominance in the south of the continent; its slow collapse and the consequent confusion of its beneficiaries who were not necessarily its supporters; as well as the divisions which beset both the black and white opposition. Apartheid was cruel, petty, absurd (it would have been comic were it a fictional creation) and inhuman. That it met, as an opponent, a man surely possessed of the heroic virtues required of a saint remains remarkable. Mandela has found in his miniaturist a biographer finely suited to his subject. Terry Philpot


have wished, compared with which the fate of a group of gemstones hardly counts. Devotees of the original (and no one was more devoted to Lord Peter than Sayers herself) can move into this continuation without fear. What we chiefly want, and what we are given, is to accompany them, like old friends about whose earlier lives we already know a great deal, as they move, playing affectionate verbal ping-pong with each other, through 1950s London. There is always a danger in such an


exercise that the reader will be distracted by looking for anachronisms and anomalies, but any such mean-minded approach is obliterated by the excellence of the writing and the abundance, verging on excess, of appropriate historical events and unquestionable period colour. The reactions of Peter, Harriet and Bunter, if sometimes debatable, are always defensible in terms which Sayers would have accepted. As a literary exercise, then, the book is


very skilful: as a Peter Wimsey story, it should give unalloyed pleasure to Sayers’ fans: and, simply in its own right as a novel, it makes joyous light reading. Anthony Lejeune


A lovable stranger


Three Minutes of Hope: Hugo Gryn on the God slot Naomi Gryn (ed.)


CONTINUUM, 270PP, £12.99 ■ Tablet Bookshop price £11.70


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ugo Gryn, the Holocaust survivor and prominent Reform rabbi, was known to an audience well beyond the Jewish world as a much-loved broadcaster, and was greatly mourned after his untimely death in 1996. In this book, with a foreword by Michael Buerk (his host on The Moral Maze), Gryn’s daughter has compiled a fascinating, informative and often moving anthology of her father’s short broadcasts. They include recollections of the Holocaust, lively explanations of various Jewish festivals and rituals, intriguing accounts of biblical episodes and personalities and his singular perception of contemporary figures and issues. The 1981 Southall riots, the assassination


of Anwar Sadat, crises in Northern Ireland and the release of Terry Waite are some of the topics he raises. What is particularly striking is the way he often links the present to a biblical precedent. The book, which is richly illustrated, also contains tributes from a variety of well-known figures including Maureen Lipman, Sir Martin Gilbert, Rabbi Lionel Blue, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, Erich Segal, Canon Roger Royle and Oliver McTernan. It is from Gryn’s acount of spending Yom


Kippur, the Day of Atonement, as a 14-year old in the Lieberose concentration camp that one of the observations for which he is best-known emerges: “People sometimes ask me: ‘Where was God in Auschwitz?’ I believe that God was there himself, violated and blasphemed. The real question is ‘Where was man in Auschwitz?’” Given his experiences, it is not surprising that interfaith activity became one of his prime concerns and was also the subject of more than one broadcast. But it is his ability to capture the essence of various Jewish customs and precepts, not least the much repeated injunction to “love the stranger”, that makes this book particularly valuable, to Jew and non-Jew alike. Emma Klein


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