A voice for a slave

The bookmakers rate André Brink's Philida as an outsider in this year's Man Booker prize. Brink himself is a little dismissive. "I don't believe I stand a chance," the author says.

"From the very beginning, when I heard about the [long-list] nomination, I just assumed they wanted to fill up their numbers."

There is, however, considerable opinion in literary circles that Brink's novel of an early 19th-century Cape slave and her ill-treatment by his own forebears will be included in the six-book shortlist announced today.

Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies and Will Self's Umbrella are certainties; other likely contenders are Nicola Barker's The Yips, Rachel Joyce's The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, and possibly Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis or Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening Mists.

"I have admired Mantel for a long time. She is just bloody good. I would expect she is the person to beat," Brink says.

We should not dismiss Philida that lightly. It is a raw, bruising experience with very little in the way of "upper-class Englishness" about it at all; as South African as the sjambok. Brink was inspired to write the novel when the owner of the farm on which the book is set told him about the slave woman Philida, who worked as a knitting girl there from 1824 to 1832. Unusually for a person in her position, Philida had laid an official complaint against her master. Philida's experiences put paid to the notion that South Africa's slavery period was "relatively mild" when compared with other slave societies.

"That was most definitely not the case," Brink says.

"It was the most shocking form of exploitation and cruelty where people were free to do anything on other people and did. If one starts digging into the few available records from the period itself, it is unbelievable in the extremes of cruelty."

Then came the "particular audacity and bloody cheek" of writing in Philida's voice. It wasn't a "fundamental problem", he says, because that is where a writer must start - imagining he or she is someone else.

"But, in the case of a white person - a white male - imagining himself into the skin, the life, of a black woman, then of course all sorts of warnings pop out all over the place because the whole power issue enters into that. It is so easy to simply appropriate the voice of somebody else, but I think one is alert to the dangers of that, the pitfalls of that particular road.

"I think one doesn't have much of a choice. You are tempted by the ability and the danger, the precariousness of trying to imagine yourself as somebody else, and in a particular country like South Africa, the black-white issue going back so far."

For Brink, the country's immediate future remains as uncertain as ever. He was scathing about the ruling party in his 2009 memoir, A Fork in the Road, suggesting it resembled nothing so much as the corrupt monsters it succeeded.

His disappointment had been "extreme", he says, because he had been impressed with the ANC leaders he'd met in exile.

"I had, possibly, totally unrealistic expectations of the changeover because apartheid to me had been so horrendous that I couldn't wait for a change to come.

"I should have been warned, because I had lived through very much the same expectations, but on a much smaller scale, during the French student revolts in 1968 when it also seemed, briefly, that a whole new world was beginning and - ha - the disappointment and the total disillusionment set in very quickly after that. But, in a way, the old hope-springs-eternal phenomenon reasserted itself so quickly and so angrily and so passionately - because one does keep hoping."

• 'Philida', Random House, R221 at Exclusive Books

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