Childish Things

What can you say about the seventies – except to wish you hadn’t been there? The sixties produced hippies and sex, the eighties yuppies and money. But the seventies? Disposable fashion, disposable music. And disposable lives in the warm country where I grew up . . . This is how thirty-three year old Mart looks back from 1990s London to remember her 17th year in 1970s South Africa. While being a teenager is never easy, in 1970s South Africa there is more to deal with than unflattering fashions and tedious teachers. There are the harsh realities of life, of politics, and even of death. Introvert Mart gets her first taste of rebellion through her roommate at her new school, the extrovert Dalena, and begins to look at her world from a new, questioning perspective. Her elder brother Simon encounters that same rebellion through his enigmatic friend Pierre. Against the backdrop of the political upheaval of the 1970s, Mart and Dalena must face upheavals of their own – at school, at home, and in their own hearts and minds. Simon and Pierre, meanwhile, must face the realities of war, ‘somewhere on the border’. It is to be a life-changing year, as all four discover, in which they are forced to grow up and abandon childish things for ever. Childish Things transforms all that was ephemeral into the stuff of enduring art as it tells the story of coming of age in a country, a culture, and a world coming apart at the neatly stitched seams. Mart Vermaak is a budding teenager trapped in a strict boarding school in the South African outback. Mart relies on her precocious, smart-mouthed roommate Dalena to save her from terminal boredom. Fortified by the novels of Carson McCullers and many dramatic interpretations of Romeo and Juliet, both girls set out to discover what life is really about. They soon find themselves in over their heads as the full weight of love, sex, and the political realities of their native land bear down on them. In alternating chapters, the adult Mart reflects on her adventures. Through her vivid memories, the vanished becomes visible again: in a marvelous montage of pop songs, rebellion, sex, comic confusions, and tragic casualties, the teenage girls become women playing games of love and lust in which risk runs high. The awkward young men they adore or abhor go off to fight for things they do not believe against foes they do not know. Wry and witty, haunting and elegiac, this novel is very much about South Africa at a crucial crossroads. Yet in its depiction of the struggle between generations, the interplay of friends and lovers, the intoxication of forging one's own identity, and the pain of paying the price of freedom, it is a story that speaks to all who are or have ever been young in a world they never made, swept toward an unknown future on tides of change they cannot control. A girl's tale of growing up in South Africa in the 1970s. The protagonist is Mart Vermaak, a 16-year-old Afrikaner whose adolescence is played out against the background of apartheid, the black liberation struggle and the Angolan War which her brother is fighting. By the author of Entertaining Angels