SOURCE: "Tunnel Visions," in London Review of Books, August 4, 1988, pp. 26-27.

In the following excerpt Horne closely examines the ideas developed in States of Emergency and critques the novel's premises and structure.

André Brink's States of Emergency […] should perhaps be described as a would-be novel. Its subtitle is 'Notes towards a Love Story', and it represents—minimally fictionalises—an attempt by a South African writer, André Brink, to produce a 'love story' at a time of political crisis, in 1985, when the current State of Emergency was declared. There are generous impulses at work in it—to assert the value of love between men and women, to resist racial oppression, to be frank about authorial difficulties—but more than equally, there are distressing traces of uncomfortable self-consciousness about what one might call the apparent stupidity of fictional creation, uneasy reachings for the support of deconstructive authorities from Paris, gestures...