Novel
Time of Our Darkness
Stephen Gray · 1988
Synopsis
Pete Walker teaches English at a white private school in Sandton, Johannesburg, and has lived for ten years with André, a flight attendant, whose lover he no longer is. Disley, thirteen, the only black pupil at the school, a scholarship boy from the township of KwaThema, turns up at his door one day; his mother then entrusts the boy to Pete. Pete takes him in and gives him work to do, but fears that the boy, who guesses at his life, may blackmail him, and the novel describes the sexual relationship in which the adult draws the pupil. Over six months, Disley makes progress and makes friends, before a bereavement calls him back to his own people.
Context
The novel appeared in 1988 in London from Frederick Muller, then in paperback from Arrow. Like other novels by its author, according to the critic Peter Dickinson, it crosses the boundaries of race, class and sexuality. On its publication, Dennis Walder judged in The Listener that its sexual scenes, gruelling, rendered the sadomasochistic subtext of the country's ordinary life; Athol Fugard hailed it as a novel “liberated” from the clichés of the South African fiction of the time. Its title is taken from “For the Fallen”, a poem by Laurence Binyon.
Who it is for
A novel in English of about three hundred and thirty pages, whose sex scenes between an adult and a child are harrowing; not translated into French.
Prizes and reception
Kurt Vonnegut, who had taught him at Iowa, saw in it an exact portrait of South African life; one of its author's most ambitious novels.
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