André Brink, an Afrikaner dramatist and novelist, belongs to a coterie of distinguished English-speaking writers who can best be described as "doom-watchers". Tirelessly, they chronicle the national sins of commission and omission, and in novel after novel they expose the injury and sickness to which the country is mortgaged by the stubborn pursuit of indefensible racial policies.

Martin Mynhardt, the hero of [Rumours of Rain]—if a buck-passing moral coward like Mynhardt can be called a hero—is a successful entrepreneur, a speculator both in land deals and in friendships, who candidly admits that people are to him "economic propositions". He is callous, insensitive, and morally evasive….

Brink's strategy of using the voice of the Afrikaner bigot to pinpoint the moral failures of the system nearly comes off; but in the end his consistent lack of virtue leaves a vacuum at the centre of the novel…. [There] is...