Some Flim-Flam with Socks

Adam Kuper

  • Storyteller: The Many Lives of Laurens van der Post by J.D.F. Jones
    Murray, 505 pp, £25.00, September 2001, ISBN 0 7195 5580 9

In 1972, when his reputation was close to its peak, Laurens van der Post published a novel called A Story like the Wind. Reviewing it in the TLS, I wrote that it was an old-fashioned colonial romance, but since the book carried a portentous preface in which Van der Post described himself as a great authority on Africa, I added that his statements about the Bushmen, the Zulu and other peoples were unreliable and tinged with racism, and that much of his material was drawn uncritically (without acknowledgment) from outdated sources. In those days TLS reviews were unsigned, but Van der Post wrote a furious letter complaining that his book had been given to an anonymous anthropologist to review. He was a novelist, he pointed out: his book should be treated as a novel. Did the editor propose to invite astronomers to review science fiction? Nevertheless, even in making this protest he had to insist on his expertise (‘I, Sir, grew up with Bushman survivors . . .’), because that was a large part of his appeal to his readers.

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