Ambitious and disturbing, [Looking on Darkness, an] anatomy of racist South African society by one of its most prominent writers, was banned immediately upon publication in that country. Approaching the stature of tragedy, the novel records the ordeal of Joseph Malan, a Colored actor who is forced to choose either the desolation of exile or oppression and destruction at the hands of the white establishment. In a book that frequently achieves, in scenes of cruelty, torture, and degradation, an unbearable intensity, Mr. Brink maintains steady control of his plot's several threads, which add up to a faceted exploration of the spiritual and cultural trauma that is the legacy of apartheid. Given the essential integrity of Mr. Brink's enterprise, one notes only with reluctance those passages, neither negligible nor infrequent, that run by turns to tendentiousness, affectation, and melodrama. Still, a passionately human vision rules here, informed by an...