Each of Lauren Francis-Sharma’s three novels begins with a calculated killing. In her 2014 debut, “’Til the Well Runs Dry,” a desperate Trinidadian girl catches and slaughters a wild opossum to feed her family. In 2020’s “Book of the Little Axe,” a band of Crow boys stalks and takes down a bighorn sheep on a hunting expedition. Now, in “Casualties of Truth,” Francis-Sharma’s tense, timely new novel about the monstrous legacy of South African apartheid, the killing in the opening pages is of a man. Like the opossum and the sheep, he is also being hunted for sustenance, albeit sustenance of a different, darker, figurative kind.
The deceased is a white policeman in 1996 Johannesburg. At the book’s outset, he is lamenting Mandela’s presidency and his own perceived loss of power under it, limping from injuries sustained during an unexplained altercation with an American girl. In the early hours of the following morning, his throat is slit by an unseen assailant. We later learn that the policeman’s execution was an act of revenge: an attempt to claim justice for other stolen lives, for stolen dignity, for the stolen agency of an entire traumatized country. But at what cost? This is the uneasy question at the center of the story: Can we ever really atone for violence without more violence? And can we survive what has been done to us without sacrificing our own humanity in the process?
From 1996 Johannesburg, the novel flashes forward to 2018 Washington, D.C., where Prudence Wright and her husband, Davis, are by all outward appearances very happily married. The Wrights are wealthy, successful and attractive, and they own an enormous home in Bethesda, Md. While Prudence contends that they are not a real Black Washington power couple, “at least not in the way Black Washingtonians knew Black Washington power couples to be,” she and Davis still turn heads when they enter a room together.
The Prudence we meet in 2018 is guarded, carefully composed, the kind of woman who has sharpened herself to a point out of self-preservation. After a tragedy-scarred childhood in Baltimore, she went on to earn three Ivy League degrees and a partnership at McKinsey before stepping back from her career to stay at home with her autistic son.
On the stormy D.C. night when Prudence’s story begins, she is accompanying Davis to meet his new colleague at what she assumes will be a tedious work dinner. But when the colleague arrives at the restaurant he turns out to be Matshediso, a South African man whose life collided with Prudence’s two decades earlier, when she spent a few months in Johannesburg for a law school internship. Matshediso knows secrets from Prudence’s past that still haunt her, and it is no coincidence that he has suddenly re-materialized as an I.T. guy at her husband’s law firm.
“Casualties of Truth” is a brutal history lesson in the guise of a thriller. The novel is taut and deftly plotted, volleying between 1996 and 2018 as it exposes Matshediso’s shared history with Prudence — and with the dead policeman — as well as what Matshediso wants with Prudence now.
There is a nightmarish quality to the story; moments of strange, almost surreal terror arise as abruptly as they vanish — a threatening man leaps onto the hood of a car without warning, a child goes missing in a restaurant, an idyllic morning at a farmers’ market devolves into trippy anguish. The potential for violence lurks beneath even the most innocuous surfaces, keeping Prudence (and the reader) perpetually on edge.
But the novel’s deeper aim is to shine a light on the human rights violations committed during the apartheid era. Amid the suspense, Francis-Sharma brings us into the courtrooms of South Africa’s 1996 Truth and Reconciliation hearings: “a system where citizens could lodge complaints and perpetrators could request pardons for the horrible things they had done,” and the new government’s way of “forging the most progressive democracy ever envisioned while also making amends for the past horrors for which they were largely not responsible.”
Prudence attends some of the proceedings as part of her internship, and the testimonies she witnesses are the most gripping passages in the entire book — bald descriptions of atrocities, made all the more appalling by the mundane delivery of the amnesty-seeking men who committed them.
“Casualties of Truth” is a tale of dual reckonings, of a woman and a country both forced to face their histories and the harrowing violence that has shaped them. Despite the pain chronicled in its pages, and despite having no easy answer to the complex question of what real accountability looks like, the book does contain a shred of hope: Though the truth alone is not justice, there is still freedom in it.
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