The original and traditional hard-back edition of CHILDREN OF ADAMASTOR from Robert Hale in London , was reviewed in THE STAR by Frances Coburn on 12 February 1994 . With renewed thanks to Frances Coburn, the review is reproduced below.  

POWERFUL NOVEL LOOKS AT MOZAMBIQUE HORROR  

CHILDREN OF ADAMASTOR by ANTHONY FLEISCHER  

Chosen as ‘Book of the Week’ by THE STAR, Johannesburg , 12 th February 1994 

Reviewed by FRANCES COBURN  

REVOLUTION is not a dinner party,

Nor an essay, not a painting

Not

A piece of embroidery; it cannot

Be advanced softly, gradually, carefully,

Considerately, respectfully,

Politely, plainly or modestly.

(Mao Tse-tung)

It is sometimes said of Australia that the reason it has produced comparatively little in the way of art, music or literature is that it has virtually no history. It has never been invaded, its borders have never been threatened, it has scarcely been at war and there has been no civil strife.

Great turmoil is supposed to produce great art; tranquility, mere inertia. So perhaps the wars, inquisitions, massacres, famines and other disasters both natural and man-made that have beset this fraught world since the dawn of history have not been entirely ill winds for without them would we have had Chagall, Solzenitsyn, Tolstoy, Shostakowich?

The point is moot. But the rough winds which blew through Mozambique in the Marxist revolution of 1974 have produced this fine novel by a writer of power which, one senses , is held in deliberate restraint. Its curiously muted tone reinforces the tragedy that befell the land; not the revolution itself, for the inherent justice in expelling usurpers is incontestable, but the brute random violence that inevitably accompanied it

This is a tale of the suffering of innocents, reaping the whirlwind sown by their elders., and in thrall as all humans are to Adamastor, cruel god of storms both elemental and emotional.

Ines Maria da Graca de Lencestra da Costa is the daughter of a wealthy and aristocratic Portuguese family, leading a life of colonial ease in Lourenco Marques . Overnight this idyllic existence is shattered by the Marxist revolution. Fleeing from their holiday house at Xai Xai, the family is caught by Frelimo soldiers. Ines’s parents are shot without ceremony at the roadside, the little girl is raped: the same old story when the dogs of war are unleashed.

Josefa, the family servant, drives the devastated little girl and her younger brother to the sanctuary of a convent. Ines, already cruelly jerked out of innocence, has more to deal with: a pregnancy that the mission’s Mother Mafalda forbids her to terminate on the grounds that all life is sacred to the Lord, no matter how savagely conceived.

Here the first signs of the child’s strong spirit emerge, a spirit that sustains her through all the bewildering chaos and injustice of the new tyranny that springs up to replace the old. Defying the reverend mother, she has the foetus aborted, Josefa at her side as always.

Tragedy heaps upon tragedy. With the death of Ines’s brother in a cholera epidemic, she resolves to leave the mission and at considerable risk returns to the holiday house at Xai Xai, there to successfully pick up the shattered remains of her father’s farming operations. But the bureaucracy is hot on her heels and the Chef do Posto at Xai Xai, having tolerated the girl and her servants-cum-friends for a while, makes it clear that her enterprise is contravening communist legislation.

Once again they take to the bush and flight becomes a way of life, ending in a perilous sea voyage aboard a crippled fishing boat that, battered by storms, deposits Ines and her newly acquired husband, Pedro, on a beach in Maputaland. There, in a bizarre almost dreamlike scene, they become swept up in a Kafka-like trial by the locals.

The tale climaxes with a snake bite and the birth of the child to which Ines has addressed her narrative. These two traditional symbols - of the serpent that topples man from innocence and of the human spirit’s regenerative ability - are a vindication both of the sadness of the story and its promise.

It is a curious combination of myth, both Christian and pagan, allegory and fable, of mankind’s hapless homage to Adamastor who tosses these children about in metaphorical as well literary stormy seas; of the ultimate banality of all the fine-sounding slogans that justify revolution most grandiosely but crumble under pressure of greed and power. The indomitability of spirit is affirmed in the face of horrible odds, even in incipient madness.

Fleischer has opted to tell Ines’s story in the first person, a notoriously difficult feat for a man, but his writing is spare, restrained, almost skeletal and the narrative voice rings true. He has admirably resisted the current vogue in both films and books to make violence and sex the dominant elements of the work. Instead they take place as part of the landscape: without comment, without sensationalism.

His authorial voice is a whisper rather than a shout and all the more powerful for that. Altogether, this is a novel of integrity and eminent readability.  

Shirley Kossick reviews Children of Adamaster by Anthony Fleischer

Published in London by Robert Hale and
in Cape Town by David Philip

The mythological impulse which informs this novel is borne out by the evocative title. Adamastor, the anthropomorphic spirit of storms at what Bartolomeu Dias called ' Cabo Tormentoso', has a long literary pedigree. Invented by Luis de Camoens for his epic Lusiads (1572) the Adamastor myth has provided many writers with a model for conflict, mainly between European colonising forces and African spontaneity.

In the present novel Fleischer takes the myth right back to its Portuguese roots and imbues it with renewed vigour.