Salt and Honey

St Just Monday Morning Reading Group 28th January 2019.

Salt and honey. Candi Miller.

Most of the reading group thought that this book was quite good, but lacking in something which might have made it much better. All the themes were present: the evils of apartheid; the doomed love-story; the encroachment of white people onto Kalahari territory; the entrapment of the 'caught' San woman; the ineffectiveness of the liberal white woman; but somehow these were insufficiently knitted together to lift the narrative off the page.

The chief issue that the book raised in this meeting was about language representation and learning. Candi Miller uses a lot of Africaans phrases, and these most of us were able to understand or interpret (she does put a glossary at the back). The Bushman language, however, with diacritics to represent the 'clicks' that this language deploys, was much more difficult, and some readers found this a barrier to reading the book. But the subject was interesting to us, and we spent some time talking about Maori and Aboriginal languages, and wondering how and when these were written down.

Positive points put forward about the book were the representation of Koba's attempt to perpetuate the San way of life, which was essentially communal, while she was living on her own in the service of the white family; the way the sparse writing style reflected the South African landscape; and the capturing of the looming sense of dread that hung over this society. It was also interesting to note that apparently there are further books by this author which continue the story of Koba and Mannie.