Voortrekkers

THE TURNING WHEELS--Stuart Cloete --Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

Due partly to the stubborn stodginess of the Boers themselves, even more to their galumphing dialect, a certain drabness of atmosphere has beclouded every novel of the Cape Colony, from Olive Schreiner's Story Of An African Farm on down. Swift, even melodramatic though The Turning Wheels is, many a reader will come an early cropper over words like baas, kopje, kloof, veldt, mevrou, spruit* with which its text is besprinkled, over the de Jongs, Zwart Pietes, van der Bergs, van Reenens who make up its confusing cast of characters. But once these obstacles are hurdled, the surviving reader can settle down to a solidly written, if a little protracted, account of pioneer hardship and leather-breeched love, its scene one of the great mass migrations of modern history.

In the Great Trek (as the Boers still call it), the hardier of the early Dutch settlers, disgruntled at the cession (1814) of the Cape Colony to the British and smarting under the alien rule, moved out with their families, their herds and their household possessions, betook themselves northward across the Orange and Vaal Rivers into the then unknown region of the Transvaal. It was a perilous undertaking, for besides the barrier range of mountains, the rivers across the way, the high plateau of the Transvaal itself was lion-infested, overrun by the warlike Zulu and Kaffir tribes. Moving in great wagon trains for safety's sake and driving their cattle before them, the emigrants swarmed in--in such numbers that by 1852 more than 40,000 voortrekkers had made the journey, resettled themselves on the new lands. It is the adventures of such a wagon train that Author Cloete (pronounced "Clooty") describes. Made up of 500-odd persons, with 100 wagons and a miscellaneous herd of 8,000 goats, cows, oxen, horses to be nudged and nursed through the wilderness, it moved like an ambling village, its scouts fanned out before it to hunt game and fight off raiders, and births, deaths and marriages taking place in the wagons lumbering along behind. Its patriarchal but still lusty leader was one Hendrik van der Berg, and the main plot of the novel revolves around his harsh, hard-bitten figure: the conflict between his Messianic impulses and his hopeless infatuation for the luscious and youthful Sannie van Reenen. his mind's decay under the strain, his eventual downfall. His followers go down with him, for largely through the bedeviled old man's mismanagement, the emigrants--now at the end of their trek and busily founding a new settlement--are caught off guard by a Zulu attack, wiped out to a man. But the cinematic plot serves principally as a framework for descriptions of the routine of South African pioneer life: the hunts, skirmishes, prayer meetings, occasional festivals. This more or less documentary side of the book will sustain most readers' interest in a novel that would otherwise be only soso.

The Author. "Inviting Stuart Cloete to dinner," complains his novelist-friend, E. Arnot Robinson, "one is never quite sure whether one will get the ex-Coldstream Guards' officer . . . who has a disconcerting habit of saying 'Good show' when he means 'How nice,' or whether the unbuttoned half-Dutch ex-farmer from Africa will turn up, liable to be reminded, by the look of the fat lady on his left, of a post mortem he did on a cow." Matter-of-fact, 40-year-old, amiably bi-natured. Novelist Cloete has been both. Enlisting in 1915 in the Guards, he was wounded at the Somme so badly that he was invalided out of further service, went down to South Africa (which one branch of his family had helped settle three centuries ago) to recuperate. He stayed 15 years, working on cattle ranches, ending as owner of a dairy farm near Johannesburg; had no thought of writing until five years ago, when, bursting with Boer legends, he returned to London, ground some of his material into London magazine serials, used the remainder in the present novel. Tall, mustached, handsome, he would like (having visited Manhattan) to divide his time between England and the U. S., is meditating a series of connected novels to bring Boer history down to date.

The Turning Wheels, Cloete's first published novel, was chosen as book-of-the-month by England's Book Society, the U. S. Book-of-the-Month Club.

*Meaning: boss, hillock, glen, plain, housewife, small river.

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