SOURCE: Review of The Ambassador, in Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 18, 1986, p. 15.

In the following review, Sutherland, an American professor of Literature, looks at the elements of Brink's fictional commentary on South African politics and society in The Ambassador.

The Victorians liked to think of Charles Dickens as their "special correspondent to posterity." For the outside world and for posterity, South Africa's novelists currently serve the same function. Our durable impressions of the Republic are formed less by what "news" state censorship allows to escape, than by the fictions of Dan Jacobson, J.M. Coetzee, Alan Paton, Nadine Gordimer, Tom Sharpe and André Brink.

The list could be extended. And given the fact that its total white population is four million (rather less than the weekend readership of the Los Angeles Times), it is evident that in its last days as we know it, South Africa is...