Willem Anker makes the seven-foot-tall hunter, farmer, cattle-thief, poacher, smuggler, mercenary, frontiersman, polygamist and general nuisance to all in authority, Coenraad de Buys (1761-1821), the narrator of this postmodern historical novel. Not the historical Buys, though, but "Alom-Buys" (omnipresent Buys), a figure outside the limitations of time and place, who can look back on his life with a certain amount of perspective and an awareness of the true and false things history has said about him.

Buys-the-narrator works on us rather like Huck Finn or Flashman: he's a totally reprehensible character in most respects, but he has an engagingly unrestrained comic voice, constantly saying things we half-wish we dared to say ourselves, he has a clear-sighted view of his own failings as well as those of everyone else around him, and he lets us look into a fascinating historical period from a rather unusual perspective. And his voice even becomes unexpectedly touching as Buys starts to get old and lose the physical ability to dominate the world around him.

Although the real Buys is obviously a hero-figure in Afrikaner culture (in a Ned Kelly kind of way), in Anker's view of him he is everything but an Afrikaner nationalist: he chooses friends, wives, allies and enemies on the basis of their personal qualities (and how many cattle and spearmen they can bring into the camp...), without any thought for race or colour. His aim is always to make a good life for Buys and his ever increasing herd of multi-coloured children and grandchildren and never mind whether his neighbours are Xhosa, Portuguese, or Dutch.

Buys with his caravan of wives, children, beasts and hangers-on constantly moving around to find unclaimed and potentially fertile corners of the veld sometimes comes over as an Old-Testament patriarch, sometimes as the leader of a pack of ravening beasts, and Anker has fun with both of these metaphors throughout. We know the mysterious dog-pack that is constantly shadowing his progress must be there for a reason, but it takes a while before we work it out.

Very enjoyable, and an interesting introduction to a period I didn't know much about. ( )