The Book Of The Heathen

Robert Edric

Editions

Review

I finished this book with the overwhelming feeling that I had just read a masterpiece.  Set in 1897 at an isolated trading station in the Belgian Congo, it is narrated by one James Frasier, whose friend Nicholas Frere awaits trial for the murder of a native child.  The incident would probably never have come to the authorities’ attention had it not suited the purposes of Hammad, the real power in the district, to see a sacrifice made of Frere.  Everybody knows that (African) life is cheap, and that Frere is in fact about the only person who attaches any value to it.  But everybody also knows that Frere crossed another kind of boundary, and nobody can forgive him for this, not even Frere himself.  At the heart is a secret whose revelation constitutes the most harrowing passage I think I have ever come across in fiction.  Not for the squeamish.  But what makes it so utterly terrible is the realization that the scene’s savagery is mirrored in all aspects by other activities and relationships described in the book.

The drama unfolds in a place where the landscape and climate draw attention to the futility of the idea of progress, and hasten dissolution.  The characters are conjured with dreadful plausibility - the evil Hammad, brutal and venal Sergeant Bone; Abbot, the infuriating corporate man who has no concern other than his own advancement; Klein, the minister with a baleful influence over many of the natives; and one or two sympathetic characters whose innocence itself is culpable, and whose hopes are destined to be shattered.  Edric describes a complete and vivid world with devastating clarity, a world teetering over the brink into an abyss where there is no redemption whatsoever.  It is gripping, and superb. - review by Johnny de Falbe