A triumph in Pretoria

Press, 13 December 1986, Page 27

A triumph in Pretoria

A Song in the Morning. By Gerald Seymour. Collins Harvill, 1986. 364 pp. $35 (approx). (Reviewed by Naylor Hillary) Seymour writes thrillers for thinking people, taking events behind yesterday’s headlines and fleshing them out with credible, fallible, fictitious characters. Once begun he is very hard to put down; he can, at times, create an almost unbearable tension.

Among his recent books, “In Honour Bound” dealt with the war in Afghanistan and the destruction wrought by Russian helicopters against hapless tribesmen. “Field of Blood” stalked the streets of Northern Ireland’s cities in a sensitive appraisal of a ghastly suburban war. “A Song in the Morning” is set in South Africa, much of it in the capital punishment block of Pretoria’s prison where songs at dawn, sung by other prisoners, accompany condemned men on their last walk to the gallows. Always with Seymour there is an overpowering sense of the triumph of human will, of the dignity of the decent individual confronted by the inhumanity of bureaucracy and

mindless violence. Even in the harshest war, he hardly seems to take sides. He is on the side of the ordinary man who faces extraordinary odds. There is a kind of victory, even when those odds overpower him. Seymour has his faults. To get his stories under way he sometimes resorts to bizarre and unlikely quirks of fate. But once fate is rolling there is a grand inevitability about events. Readers are whirled along in a flurry of convincing twists of plot and accurately observed detail of people and places. "A Song in the Morning” could well be banned in South Africa. After all, a maximum security prison gets broken into — and broken out of. But it will hardly please opponents of the South African system, either. Family loyalty, not an abstract sense of justice denied, is at the root of the action. No group or race has a monoply on decent intentions, or evil actions. Jack Curwen, the hero, triumphs in the sense that Conrad’s Lord Jim is triumphant. He is a small, steady flame in a dark world, and Seymour demonstrates a refined and polished skill in telling Curwen’s story.