André Brink's large, impressive novel [Rumours of Rain] maps the life of a contemporary, de-mythologized Afrikaner. He is Martin Mynhardt, an urbanized and secularized being; wealthy, sophisticated, sensual. He registers some of the changes that have occurred in the national psyche. A defensive complacency hiding increasing uneasiness is one such change…. Choosing moral disengagement in the interests of personal 'survival' [Mynhardt] discovers that survival in a void is hardly worth it…. And after all, as the title of the novel indicates, the deluge arrives at last. Brink's portrayal of the new Afrikaner as an anchorless paper-tiger of capitalist self-interest, is closely modelled on Nadine Gordimer's almost identical portrait of white cynicism in The Conservationist (1974). But although, magpie-like, he collects and rearranges other writers' ideas, Brink adds some items of his own. (p. 94)

Brink's original contribution in the novel is the creation of the revolutionary Bernard Frankel and here...