Three stars means I liked the book. But I don't like Mark Behr. I'll get to that.

The blurb at the top of this pager gives a pretty good background to the story: pre-adolescent/adolescent boy growing up in South Africa under apartheid, coming to terms with his gay-ness in a deeply repressive society. Good strong subject. The psychology is convincing, the picture of South African society likewise, the prose fluent and even poetic.

Yet it failed to quite convince me. It read, far too often, like a wet dream - a record of adult fantasy, not of real experience. Maybe my own sex life has been just too dull and boring and I can't believe.

(Should mention the structure - it's highly episodic, not chronological, which is fine by me but seems to have defeated some of our reviewers.)

So, all in all I liked it without quite coming all the way on board. But as I said, I don't like Mark Behr. The reason is contained here:
http://angryafrican.net/2007/12/16/th...

A book about a 13-year-old boy in Standard 6 (Grade 8) in the Drakensberg Boys Choir School.

It's a long book (over 700 pages) and written partly in "stream of consciousness" style. It follows Karl De Man though his school year, but it also jumps back to his memories of earlier events in his life, from his earliest childhood.

The novel is semi-autobiographical, as the protagonist, like Behr himself, was born in Tanganyika (before it united with Zanzibar to become the United Republic of Tanzania). When he was 2 years old the family moved to South Africa where his father became a game ranger for the Natal Parks Board, and he then attended the Drakensberg Boys Choir School from the age of 11. The main period covered by the book is his third year at the school, when he develops a crush on one of the teachers and also on a fellow pupil, as well as a girlfriend whom he sees in the holidays, who is two years older than him.

Another teacher recognises his ability in art and writing, but his macho father wants him to ignore his talents and prepare for a more lucrative career, even if it is in fields that don't really interest him. So a lot of the book deals with teenage angst, and probably quite authentically, since it is based on the author's personal experience.

The chronology is at times confusing, as the "present" moves through his year at school, but there are conversations in which he refers to previous events in his life, which he later recalls in stream of consciousness fashion. He also tries to sort out what are genuine memories, and what he has been told by others, and he becomes quite lyical in his descriptions of the Mfolozi, Hluhluwe and Mkuzi game reserves where he lived until the age of about 7.

I found that in some parts the book, like Frankie and Stankie, was evocative of my own childhood and life. Both books mentioned not only childhood experieves that were similar to mine, but also people whom I had met in real life, though not as a child.

At one point he writes of shooting mousebirds with an air rifle, and I remember doing that, standing in our paddock, and shooting at mousebirds in the almond trees. I was with someone else, I forget who, and my mother stormed out, very angry, and said she would confiscate my air rifle if she ever caught me shooting birds again.

Another similar childhood experience was when he was riding a horse behind another, which kicked him, and he had to have stitches in his knee. I recalled being kicked by pony Tom, on the sole of my foot, in similar circumstances. I could recall the cold and the wet and my bare feet in the stirrups, my wet jeans, my wet shirt clinging to me, and down below the Jukskei River, flowing through Lyndhurst. I thought he had kicked me on the knee too, but perhaps that was another occasion, and I remember my knee being bruised and swollen, though not so that I needed stitches.

There were also considerable differences, however. Mark Behr describes the racist and white supremacist views of many of the pupils and teachers at the Drakensberg Boys Choir School in the 1970s. It was a private fee-paying school, and therefore under no obligations to give the National Party indoctrination that went on in government schools, but apparently it did. When I was the protagonist's age I attended St Stithian's College in the 1950s, and I don't recall such racist attitudes among the teachers at all, and relatively rarely among the pupils.

Another thing that struck me, which has nothing to do with the content, was that the publishers (Abacus) had obviously paid no heed to the adage "Putt knot yore trussed in spell chequers." The book really could have made use of a human editor, but was apparently produced by an el-cheapo publisher who tried to save money by dispensing with their services and relying on a semi-literate typist using a spelling checker. Among the numerous errors were "in cohort with" where "in cahoots with" was obviously intended, and "pallet" instead of "palate".

A somewhat expanded version of this review is on my blog here.

This was well written, although I felt like this novel could have been two books: one a memoir of a childhood in South Africa and one about Karl's sexual awakening. I found 'The Smell of Apples' fascinating, so was looking forward to 'Embrace' although the length put me off for a while. I enjoyed reading a novel set in areas familiar to me growing up: Maritzburg, Matubatuba, Mfolozi, Charters, St Lucia etc. This novel gives an interesting account of what it was like to grow up in South Africa in the seventies. I identified with the language and references and I reminisced over my own childhood as I read. Having schooled at Epworth Primary in Maritzburg in the seventies, I came into contact with some of the cast from the Drakensberg Boys Choir who performed in Oliver around the mid seventies. I couldn't help wondering who Behr's characters were based on. My father was also involved in 'Save the Rhino' as a vet. The caning was brutal at boys' schools and my own brothers came home bloodied many times during their school careers. Totally barbaric, and as a teacher for over 25 years, I know it is completely unnecessary. I do wonder how much boys experimented sexually in boarding schools and how much grooming went on there from teachers or older students? The prejudice apparent between black and white and Afrikaner and English must be quite an eye opener for non South Africans. The white snobbery was also cringeworthy.

Enjoyed it from start but was a tad disappointed with the quick ending which left me with a feeling there was more to tell.

This has to be one of my all-time favorite novels. It depicts the coming to awareness of racism in the life of an Afrikaner boy in South Africa, just as the struggle against apartheid goes into high gear. It is also the coming of age story of a homosexual boy. Mark Behr wrote brilliantly and died much too young. He was working on a fourth novel at the time of his death. I wish he had had the time to finish it.