SOURCE: "African Realities," in Tribune Books, October 16, 1994, pp. 6, 7.

In the following review, Plott outlines the story that makes up On the Contrary, and explores the protagonist as relevant historical figure.

The work of Andre Brink, one of South Africa's finest writers, has always been linked to the struggle to satisfy the conscience in an unjust land. In such harrowing novels as A Dry White Season (1980) and An Act of Terror (1991), he has, like fellow South Africans Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee, made apartheid and its corrupting terrors a centerpiece of his fiction.

At the same time, Brink's work in recent years has shown an increasing and sophisticated preoccupation with the broader themes of myth, fable and history—in short, with the nature of storytelling itself. In his last novel, Cape of Storms: The First Life of Adamastor (1993), the mountains of the Cape, as in an ancient fable...