The Mandela Plot

March 5, 2018
Set in 1980s South Africa, this uneven literary thriller from National Jewish Book Award winner Bonert (The Lion Seeker) focuses on 16-year-old Martin Helger, a bored student at a private religious day school in Johannesburg. His routine life changes with the arrival of Annie Goldberg, an anthropology major at Columbia who has come to teach at a
primary school in one of the city’s black townships, as
a guest of his family. Instantly smitten, Martin becomes obsessed with Annie. He regularly sneaks into her room to search her possessions, among which he finds a concealed videotape. Annie catches him in the act; later, she reveals that the tape contains instructions for making explosives, and that she’s working to topple the apartheid regime. Motivated by lust rather than political conviction, Martin becomes her accomplice in duplicating the video so it can be widely distributed. Predictably, Annie and Martin’s efforts fall short with tragic results. Underdeveloped as a lead, Martin experiences personal losses that don’t pack the emotional punch readers would expect in the circumstances. Bonert fails to make the most of an intriguing setup. Agents: Kim Witherspoon and Maria Whelan, Inkwell Management.

March 15, 2018
Sophomore novel from South African writer Bonert (The Lion Seeker, 2013) exploring the turbulent closing years of the apartheid regime.Martin Helger is a teenage mess. As one of the band of neighborhood kids who torments him says, "You don't have any friends. You can't do sports....You don't have really much personality, hey, I mean admit." He's different, a working-class Jew in a world of segregation and separation, and he'll certainly never measure up to his brother, Marcus, who's graduated from high school and has disappeared somewhere in the front lines of war, missing in action and likely dead. A spot of hope comes into his life in the form of an American whirlwind, "a serious beauty" named Annie Goldberg, who's come to live with the Helgers while teaching African children in a township school. Annie smolders at the injustice of apartheid, and Martin falls under her spell even as the state security forces begin to clamp down on the anti-apartheid movement. It doesn't take long before the violence begins to mount, and then, one by one, Martin's friends and family begin to leave the stage, with only a very bad Afrikaaner cop to suggest a way out. Until, that is, Marcus returns; as it turns out, he has been an elite fighter all along and is now tangled up in a scheme meant to destroy the anti-apartheid cause once and for all. "Violence works," he says. "S'why they cane you from the start." Drawing on real events in recent South African history, Bonert unfolds a sometimes-crawling plot that threatens now and again to veer into Frederick Forsyth territory, though it's embedded in an eminently literary character study that explores a Jewish community whose elders are deeply reluctant to take part in the struggle--"Our job as Jews is to take care of Jews!" shouts Martin's father--but who, as always and everywhere, are swept up in the chaos.Chaim Potok meets Leon Uris: a solid if overlong portrait of violence and renewal.

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April 15, 2018

This novel by award-winning author Bonert (The Lion Seeker) is told in the voice of 17-year-old Martin Helger, who is coming of age and political awareness in late 1980s South Africa, a time of violent resistance to the white supremacist government, when apartheid was cracking. Martin's family is part of a Jewish minority that benefits from white rule but also feels perpetually threatened by the corrupt anti-Semitic Afrikaaner police. Martin is an outsider at his posh Jewish prep school; his dad made his fortune in scrap metal, while other students are heirs to gold and diamond mines. When an idealistic American exchange student from Columbia University comes to stay with his family, Martin is pulled into the radical underworld of African National Congress supporters. At times, this story reads like a YA adventure novel, with many brawls, harrowing escapes, outrageous plot twists, and some graphic violence. Martin's voice, replete with South African and Yiddish slang (a helpful glossary is included), rings authentic. VERDICT Having the narrative confined to Martin's viewpoint intensifies readers' understanding of South African life and the politics of apartheid, although his naïveté sometimes gets in the way.--Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

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