An Instant in the Wind is the third of André Brink's novels which he has published in Afrikaans and then translated into English. The first, published in England as File on a Diplomat (1964), was an experiment in point of view in the manner of the Alexandria series of Lawrence Durrell, whom Brink quoted in an epigraph to the effect that sexual love is "a form of metaphysical enquiry." His two recent novels pursue the implications of this notion as it applies to the bugbear of miscegenation. Looking on Darkness … was a frank confrontation with miscegenation in a contemporary South African setting. An Instant in the Wind confronts miscegenation in the colonial past—a subject taboo in South Africa because estimates of the probable African component in the Afrikaner genetic pool threaten the rigid simplifications of apartheid.

What Brink has produced is a historical novel with an almost documentary...