Viva Brighton Issue #74 April 2019

BITS AND BOOKS
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BOOK REVIEW: YOU WILL BE SAFE HERE
BY DAMIAN BARR
Damian Barr is a busy man.
When he’s not writing columns
for The Sunday Times and
The Big Issue, he’s host at his
Literary Salon, at the Savoy
Hotel in London. With Martini
dry wit he’s talked books to
Armistead Maupin, Bret Easton
Ellis, JoJo Moyes, Patrick Gale
– the list grows longer and
more glamorous by the month.
Below all this swanning about,
though, is a very powerful
drive, stemming I think from
his upbringing in Motherwell.
He chronicled this tough background in Maggie
and Me, his memoir of growing up gay and
bookloving in the 1980s, and now comes his
first novel, You Will Be Safe Here.
On a sunny Spring afternoon I speak to him
down the phone from Viva HQ. I ask him why
he’s set the novel largely in Johannesburg. “I was
reading an article about the murder of a boy in
South Africa,” he tells me in his warm, Caledonian
tones. “He looked just like a boy that I’d gone
to school with. The story of what happened to
that boy is part of the inspiration for one of the
contemporary characters in the book.”
This led me to ask about the dual timelines in
the novel. After a short prologue, the book opens
with the diary of Sarah van der Watt, taken from
her farm by the British in 1901, and brought
with her six-year-old son to Bloemfontein
Concentration Camp. The diary is addressed to
Sarah’s husband, who is fighting against her captors.
“Time is the novelist’s tool,” he says, reflecting
on Britain’s relationship with
her former colony. “That history is
being repeated and also ignored is
a strange irony.” He warms to his
theme. “I found it most revealing
to go to the Anglo-Boer War
Museum in Bloemfontein, and to
meet the murdered boy’s mother.”
The depth and commitment of his
research – five years in total – is
evident throughout the novel,
whether in the details of Sarah’s
experiences as a prisoner, or in the
use of slang and Afrikaans that runs
like barbed wire through its pages.
The harshness of colonial history culminates
in an account of a second camp, where young,
awkward Willem is sent at the urging of his stepfather,
who wants Will’s awkwardness drilled out
of him. This awkwardness is the awkwardness
most teenagers go through, which Barr expertly
evokes, as well as creating female characters –
Willem’s mother and grandmother, a black judge
– who counterbalance Sarah’s Boer voice.
We get off the phone and I wonder where
Damian Barr will go next. For there is no doubt
that he has written a moving and brilliantly
written novel, shot through with poetic touches
and characters you won’t easily forget. I have a
feeling we’ll be seeing him on a fair few podiums
in 2019. You Will Be Safe Here is terrific.
John O’Donoghue
You Will Be Safe Here, Bloomsbury, £16.99.
Damian will be interviewed by Natalie Haynes
at 7pm, Thursday 4th, St. Michael & All Angels
Church, Victoria Road, £10. City Books/Eventbrite
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