With the high crime levels and economic struggles of the Republic of South Africa, it is easy to forget just how comparatively bloodless the transition to multi-racial rule from apartheid really was. If you need to be reminded of how badly things could have turned out, then Larry Bond's Vortex is worth reading. When first published in 1991, just a year after Nelson Mandela's release, it must have seemed Cassandra-like: with hindsight we can be thankful that things turned out differently.
The South Africa at the start of the story is one where Mandela has indeed been released and the white Nationalist Party under President Haymans (a cameo of de Klerk?) is trying to ease his countrymen towards a more racially equal society while keeping them in tow with his reforming policies: a tricky tightrope to walk, as shown by the rise of the Afrikaner Weerstandbeweging, or Afrikaner Resistance Movement, both historically and here fictionally. (In his glossary Bond compares the AWB with the Klu Klux Klan and Minutemen in the USA but dryly notes that in fact the US groups are too liberal). In fact in the book the AWB is a more dangerous instrument, mainly because it is led by the far-Right minister of the interior Karl Vorster. Vorster authorises a raid on a Zimbabwean office of the African National Congress which reveals that the militant wing of the ANC are about to deliver a hard military blow to the government. Instead of using this information to foil the move, Vorster allows it to go ahead, thus playing into his hands and allowing him to set his own agenda and take over the government. With all domestic opposition swept aside, he can then launch his invasion of Namibia: a colossal miscalculation that draws in the Cubans left in Angola, and finally the US. Despite the non-superpower nature of the conflict, hi-tech weaponry is used along with old tried and tested arms such as AK-47s and traditional Zulu arms, and both nuclear and chemical warfare rear their ugly heads.
Bond paints on a broad canvas with many characters but nevertheless manages to make them convincing. Perhaps central to the unfolding tragedy is Commandant Henrik Kruger, a patriotic South African professional officer who is nevertheless aware of the reality of events and despises the demagoguery that would throw away a whole nation. Eventually, like many a German officer in a previous conflict, he is forced to confront his own conscience and make an agonising decision. His life is not made easier by the fact that the woman he previously loved, a daughter of an up-and-coming Interior Ministry official, is in love with an American journalist of a more liberal persuasion. Personally I warmed to Kruger most in this book, and if there are any heroes in it, he is one. The other is the aforementioned journalist, Ian Sherfield, for whom at least the struggle is fairly black and white (no pun intended) but who still needs considerable physical courage to see it through and for whom things get personal when his cameraman is murdered by a bomb. Bond is a sympathetic writer, and the only men portrayed as utterly bad are Vorster, not merely because of his views but because of the means he uses to achieve the end, and Erik Muller, the secret policeman whose one weakness is a terrible secret that he must conceal from his countrymen. Cowards on any side are castigated, but the writer shows those Cold War bogeymen the Cubans as being human, particularly their commander General Antonio Vega, a man having, like Kruger, to deal with the reality of war on the ground rather than as seen through ideological spectacles. The Americans I found slightly less memorable as characters, although the senator and his aides in the book come across as more likeable and decent than the ones I remember from Bond's novel of a second Korean war. As a Briton, I also found the British paratroopers and SAS quite convincing.
The book itself is quite long, nearly one thousand pages, but it flows so well that I read it in five days on holiday. Bond is a good story teller, strongest on military and political detail but passable on the token romance that usually occurs in his books, and for those who are uncertain about the politics of South Africa or some of the terms and acronyms involved with modern weaponry there is a very useful glossary of terms at the back of the book.
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