Heaven Forbid

by Christopher Hope

Book Overview

A haunting and engaging novel of innocence lost, Heaven Forbid is Booker Nominated Christopher Hope's finest novel to date. In the garden and surroundings of his Johannesburg home. Martin Donnally is... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0333724658
• ISBN13: 9780333724651
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: MacMillan
• Length: 327 Pages

Customer Reviews

paradise lost

The opener "When I was about five, I used to lie in bed and think about my past.." told me I was in for a somewhat comical and highly personal journey. This captivating `memoir', told through the eyes of five-year-old Martin Donnally, is set in his grandfather's house, the "Villa Vanilla", in particular in `his' garden, in 1948, the year that "Our Lot" (the relatively `liberal' Jan Smuts) lost the general (only whites voted) election and the "New Lot" (the Nats) won, and the year his mother "left him" for another man, evokes the world of a five-year-old with humour and insight - his larger-than-life, eccentric Irish Catholic extended family: Grandpa who sings and races horses; chain smoking ascerbic 'excommunicated' Auntie Fee, who sides with the ogres in fairy tales and who makes up her own heroic stories about Martin's dead father; and most of all, Georgie, the Zulu servant and Martin's `nannie' and confidant. But into this world arrives dour, racist, Presbytarian, cruel Gordon, his mother's husband-to-be. The hints are there from the beginning of the imminent disintegration of Martin's seemingly timeless and Edenic world: "I was at home in the garden , but the garden wasn't my home". The novel resonated especially for me, having grown up in Johannesburg in the same period. In an interview Hope described his novel as "not a view from the top down, but from knee-height up", admitting its autobiographical nature, his mixing of his childhood memory with family history, with a crucial moment in South Africa's history and "a bit of poetic licence". Readers will enjoy its piognant blend of humour and its sense of imminent seismic and irrevocable change.