SOURCE: "Free of the Bad Old World," in New York Review of Books, Vol. XLI, No. 20, December 1, 1994, pp. 12-3.

In the following review, Wood concentrates on characterization in None to Accompany Me, detecting autobiographical impulses in the narrative.

Prisons have opened, exiles have returned, the notion of apartheid is in ruins. Blacks have moved into white suburbs, a new constitution is being drafted, the old opposition is practicing for new habits of rule. But there are hit lists, muggings, murders; violent rearguard actions; there is a housing shortage, there are land disputes, squatters risking their lives to reverse old patterns of settlement. There are unheeded warnings that corruption doesn't vanish easily, and isn't a respecter of race or class or political and tribal boundaries. This is the last year of the old South Africa, or as Nadine Gordimer puts it in her new novel [None to Accompany Me...