By BRUCE DENNILL, HUGH HUGGETT & ROB HOFMEYR
Outside Looking In by TC Boyle
Chastise by Max Hastings and William Collins
Catching Tadpoles by Ronnie Kasrils
Timothy Leary is well-known to anyone with even a passing interest in Sixties culture. As a Harvard professor, he was at the vanguard of promoting psychedelic drugs as a means to expand consciousness and, theoretically, to help in psychiatric treatments. His methods – including taking the drugs himself and with colleagues, friends and students, rather than experimenting under strict laboratory conditions – made him a controversial figure, but his charisma overrode the doubts of many. TC Boyle imagines a fictional account of going along for the ride with Leary, with his main narrator, Fitz, a fellow academic who finds himself caught up in the scientific excitement as well as the need to belong to a community he values, however counter-cultural. Real history and science are thrown into the mix here, but what Boyle does best is present a story that makes the thrill of being part of such a movement seem understandable (if not reasonable), and later to unpack the consequences of continually moving the moral goalposts to accommodate whatever compromise individuals and the group as a whole have made to allow themselves to believe that their experiment still matters. As an adult fairytale gone sour, Outside Looking In offers a number of warnings, even if, as Leary, promised upfront, it was always going to be “one hell of a trip”. – BD
Chastise is a modern analysis of the Dambusters’ bombing raid, which was an initiative by the RAF in World War ll to halt the German war effort. Paul Brickhill’s The Dam Busters (1951) and the film The Dam Busters (1955) made heroes of the creator of the bouncing bombs, Barnes Wallace, and Wing Commander Guy Gibson and the pilots of squadron 617. But Max Hastings shows, through great attention to detail and extensive research, another side to the story so revered by every reader and film viewer of the mid-Fifties. Operation Chastise, launched in May 1943, aimed to destroy three dams on the Ruhr in the industrial heart of the Reich, thus ultimately flooding munitions factories, mines and power stations essential to the German war effort. The dams were extremely well designed and had a mighty and significant role to play in the German war effort. The British had no bombs capable of destroying the dams as not only were they protected by torpedo nets and gun emplacements, but were almost inaccessible to the RAF bombers. The bomb, brilliantly designed and developed by Barnes Wallis, had to be unique in that it needed to be heavy (it was a forerunner to the Tall Boys later in the war). It also had to carry a sufficiently large capacity to destroy the dams and yet had to bounce over the torpedo nets. It furthermore had to be dropped from a low altitude, requiring special skills from the pilots, while the planes had to be especially modified to hold the bomb and spin it slowly in reverse as it was dropped. The tension underlying the development of the bomb and the rivalry of those in charge of the RAF and Allied war efforts show a different picture from that shown in the film and book. The initial inability of the High Command to take relevant and meaningful action was further handicapped by the role of the pilots of the bombers. Many of them were young and untested in the unfamiliar role of bomber pilots and unfamiliar with the demands of flying in the conditions demanded of them and the stress they lived under, as shown by hasty marriages and letters written to family members in case of their being shot down. These are all matters of concern to the author, which makes for gripping reading when the reader assesses the success of the dropping of the bombs. But there is an important aspect to consider in weighing up the result of the bombing in the war effort: were the raids a success when judged against the deaths of the working slaves of the Reich? Did the raids achieve the envisaged destruction of the industrial centre so necessary to the German war effort when the factories were so soon operational following the work of Albert Speer’s repair workon the two dams, the Mohne and Eder? Why were there no follow-up missions after the valiant attacks where the cost of personnel and aircraft lost was so significant? Ultimately, nothing should detract from the poignancy of the photographs, the personal details of the men and their courage and the development of the unique bouncing bomb in the story of such heroic war effort. Max Hastings tells a gripping tale of an almost forgotten era. With the hindsight of nostalgic reminiscences captured in his tale and the memory of these heroic moments captured once more, his handling of the tale is unforgettable. – HH
Subtitled “The Shaping of a Young Rebel”, Catching Tadpoles is the autobiographical account of Ronnie Kasril’s early life. It appears last in a series that includes Armed and Dangerous and The Unlikely Secret Agent. It is less important as a record of the South African Struggle than either of these books, but it is interesting as social history. Certainly, it reflects issues of apartheid in the context of Johannesburg’s white working class suburbs. There is an apologia in the preface: readers of earlier books questioned Kasril’s ability to recollect accurately some of the childhood events he recounted. This might be a problem for readers of this volume. The book has merits. It yields rich insights into life in exuberant suburbs like Yeoville in the late 1930s, through to 1960 when it was something of a “Jewish shtetl”, with immigrants, principally Jewish, from many countries in Eastern Europe, multicultural, full of challenge and enterprise and social life. It was a white world, and “natives” were there on sufferance and only as servants. In this world, Kasril’s parents were exceptional, treating all others as human beings, with respect and deference. His mother in particular “had a palpable sense of what was unjust”. Schooling was at Yeoville Primary and then at the prestigious and very different King Edward VII School in Houghton. Kasrils immerses us in his life in all its details and there is little distinction between intimate personal life, schoolboy machismo and the real business of his dawning political awareness and intellectual growth. Bedrooms and serious intellectual engagement are one great romp. I have read plenty of autobiographies including those of eminent politicians, but none which shows this degree of adolescent narcissism. More to the point, his political awareness sprang from his fierce defiance of what he considered injustice and being exposed to people of every race and class and social condition, he developed powerful convictions. Sharpeville in 1960 brought a shattering understanding of just how appalling the official race policies and the racism which permeated white society were. This is the account also of Kasril’s plunging into philosophy and political theory and his immersion, ultimately, in Marxism. It is impossible to distinguish between happy recollection and factual history. Inevitably, Kasril’s word is what holds sway and readers must live with that. The book is something of a mixed bag, but probably worth reading as an introduction to the better and more mature books. – RH
