It has been a struggle to find something good to say about this book and the best I can come up with is the fact that it is only 225 pages long and there is the germ of something good in it. Unfortunately, the effort required to hack through some of the most toe-curlingly pretentious prose ever inflicted on a reader scarcely repays the effort.
This slim volume sets two tales in parallel – one in an unnamed African country where a brutal internal war has been waged, the other in modern Zimbabwe. Ian Holding has chosen to use one of the most hackneyed plot devices to ensure a deep yawn from the reader but I have sufficient respect for his work to avoid betraying the twist in the tale – even though it has just been used by Jeffrey Archer and is thus beyond the pale of civilised comment.
One strand follows two boys, an adult man, a very pregnant woman and a suffering victim on a march to nowhere but a place where there might be safety. The war has left blood and bodies all around and the travellers find their lives narrowing in a search for food and something like safety.
Occasional scenes are well painted and, when the party crouch by the roadside to watch in fear as a convoy of militia drive by with scores of boys yoked at the neck with steel wire, bound for either the short life of a child soldier or something even more terrible, the author does his work well.
But then we have lines such as “When the night comes they rouse themselves and sit under the spume of stars waiting for the encroaching spores of reality to catch up with them again” and “They lie there jerking off until the inevitable spasm grips them. They pan the effluent whiteness into the palm of their hands or it specks the sweaty blackness of their stomachs.” There is more – and worse.
The Zimbabwe section is told through the diary of a teacher about to take the gap and flee the land. Much of this is authentic and it is by far the better part of the book – but it doesn’t make the whole worth the cover price. There have been many books written about the Congo wars. They covered similar blood-soaked territory and set something of a standard. Of Beasts & Beings doesn’t match them. There is a good – possibly a great – book in Ian Holding but this is not it.
