[In An Instant in the Wind a] civilised woman, her husband dead, is lost in the wilderness (this time South African); [she is] rescued by an escaped prisoner (this time a black slave) with whom she experiences for the first time fulfilled sexual love, but whom she betrays after the long trek back to civilisation.

[Although] the novel is set in the eighteenth century, [Mr Brink] is writing of the immediate political mythos of his country—he is, in fact, writing blasphemy. In such circumstances only an almost superhumanly cool nerve could walk that razor's edge between racial phantasy and individual imagination, between allegory and psychology, which could have made this a great book.

As it is, An Instant in the Wind is a very valuable window into South African white culture—even, to some small extent, into black culture. What it conveys most strongly is the relationship...