SOURCE: "Images of Africa," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4718, September 3, 1993, p. 23.

In the following review, Wormald explores the rich texture of the historical and imaginative world of Brink's On the Contrary.

On a solitary excursion at sunset, during the first of the three journeys into the dark heart of Africa that make up this extraordinary novel, André Brink's hero, Estienne Barbier, sees a unicorn. "It appears, heraldic, flat against the sun … its tall single horn rising like a scimitar from its forehead." Then, with a single shot from his gun, he kills it. Standing over the dead body, he is "stunned by the creature's beauty":

It is a curious emotion that overwhelms me: not so much elation at having in one shot introduced a creature of myth into the domain of the possible, voire the real, as sorrow. I am standing at some desolate frontier, and no one...