Peter Harris
288 pages. Soft cover

You get important books, and you get irritating books, and, once in a while, you get a really important book that really irritates.

Peter Harris’ ‘Birth’ is one such.

See, I can’t read stories written in the present tense. I blame it on Hunter S. Thompson. His style was meant to be immediate and edgy, and to convey the emotions and tensions of the moment.

Instead, it comes off as pretentious and (I’ll say it again) irritating - largely because of the tricks and convolutions to which the writer has to resort in order to communicate a sense of the passage of time. And while I would never say that ‘Birth’ is pretentious, the tricks and convolutions it requires are more worthy of Cape Town’s Zip Zap Circus than an insider’s view of a defining moment in our country’s history. (And its curt, staccato, dime-novel style does nothing to help, either.)

“The country was ablaze. There were bomb blasts, massacres, assassinations. The right wing wanted a Volkstaat; Inkatha wanted secession for KwaZulu and was prepared to fight for it. It was a time fraught with danger. It was a time loaded with possibility. Peter Harris saw it all from the inside.”

Not even I could have written such poor copy (and yes, the blurb is written in the style of the book).

Still, I ploughed through ‘Birth,’ and I think everyone should, too - again, not because it’s readable, but because it’s important to read. And no, it isn’t all heavy going: there are some really, really funny bits amongst the terror and the fear. The stripper who came to perform at Solveigh Piper’s birthday bash and got drenched by the fire sprinklers which were triggered by the sparklers on the birthday cake… advocate Norman Arendse’s first ever cell phone call (to his wife: “Darling, this is Norman, come in, come in, over”)… and the five senior policemen from Scotland Yard who were mugged by a group of small boys as they walked from their hotel to the IEC’s offices - directly across the road (“Please accept my apologies … and welcome to South Africa”).

Remember, if you’re a tourism professional, that our industry was developed on the back of the (long lost, I’m afraid) Democracy Dividend, and it’s as well to consider in these trying times - with democracy once more under threat as a result of attacks on the freedom of the press - how difficult and close the transition to peace really was.

For all my issues with it, ‘Birth’ is a book everyone really ought to read.

Buy it here