The cost of survival

What has a novel set in 1930s Russia to do with anti-apartheid activists? Gillian Slovo explains to Aida Edemariam.

There is a still moment near the end of Gillian Slovo's 1997 family memoir when, in the cold of dawn, just after her father has died, Nelson Mandela says exactly the right thing. Slovo's parents had been part of the fight against apartheid since the early 1950s. Joe was chief of staff of the armed wing of the ANC until 1994, when he became housing minister. Her mother, Ruth First, a tireless campaigner, was killed on August 17th, 1982, by a letter bomb addressed to her by the South African security forces.

But Mandela, to whom Joe spoke his last words, does not talk grandly of the struggle; instead he tells Slovo and her two sisters about a day when he went to hug his own grown daughter and she flinched, saying: "You are the father to all our people, but you have never had the time to be a father to me." This, writes Slovo, "was his greatest, perhaps his only regret: the fact that his children, and the children of his comrades, had been the ones to pay the price of their parents' commitment". You can sense her relief that someone has acknowledged what her parents did not. "And yet, and yet, what else could they have done?"

Every Secret Thing, her one volume of nonfiction, was an attempt to make sense of it all; her fiction - there are now 10 novels, with the just-published Ice Road by far the most ambitious - has increasingly pursued similar questions: what is the cost of trying to change the world and who exactly pays it? Slovo, who has lived in London since her family was exiled there in 1964, answers everything fully, calmly, with impressive emotional articulacy. And yet I have the same nagging feeling as I did when I closed Every Secret Thing: much has been revealed, difficult questions have been asked and tackled head on, but there is still a central opacity. Her animation does not entirely hide a wary detachment.

Her childhood was never entirely normal. Though at first there was great energy to her parents' involvement with the ANC, lots of daringly mixed parties and great hopefulness, they were increasingly harried and absent. She feels her parents drastically underestimated what children understand by osmosis; that their parents' friends were being raided by the police, for example, and that the Slovos might be next.

The first books Slovo wrote were the kind she enjoyed: hard-boiled detective novels, with a 1970s feminist twist. Her investigator was often a woman; the novels were often set in South Africa. Although she is uneasy about such assumptions, the genre takes violence and controls it, makes sense of it, solves it. "It's a great irony of crime fiction: you're talking about murder and death and you'd think that comes along with all kinds of emotions and grief, but not in a detective novel. That's not the point of it."

Red Dust, from 2000, is essentially a thriller, but it is also an examination of the demands of political and personal loyalty and particularly of the intimacies of oppression. It is about the amnesty hearing of an apartheid torturer and his now-powerful black victim. She says that she set it in the Karoo, far from her native Johannesburg, so that people would not draw too many parallels with her own life. But it is hard not to. In 1998, she and her sisters attended the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to hear the application for amnesty of Craig Williamson and Roger (a.k.a. Jerry) Raven, who killed her mother. She concludes that although the last thing spoken at the commission is the truth she can see it anyway - and that it is simple: "They are white supremacists whose motive for killing Ruth was hatred."

Ice Road, a historical page-turner, is set in very different terrain: Leningrad from the early 1930s to halfway through the siege. Kirov is assassinated, triggering the first waves of disappearances; the revolution is curdling. "One of the questions that I started the book with," says Slovo, "is, What do you do when you want to change the world for the better, and you seem to have achieved power, and then everything that you dreamed and hoped for becomes changed and tarnished and destroyed, but in the name of those ideals?"

It's a question her parents never got to wrestle with. Although her father tasted triumph, he died nine months after the ANC took power. "It's quite interesting going back every year," she says. "In 1994 it was just wonderful - everybody was in such a good mood; they'd 'won'. But a couple of years later I began to detect more depression, a generalised realisation of how difficult it is to turn around a country that has such inequality endemic in it, and now I'm beginning to feel the optimism coming back again."

Her next project is to be a play with Victoria Brittain for the Tricycle Theatre, in London, about Guantanamo Bay. There might be one more South African novel, but not necessarily. "South Africa is changing too fast for someone who doesn't live there to be able to write convincingly about it." And however upbeat she may seem there is still her conclusion facing her mother's killers: "I don't think I'll ever feel quite the same about South Africa. I have looked too deeply into its malevolent heart. I have seen that its evil had a human face."

... - Guardian Service

Ice Road, by Gillian Slovo, is published by Time Warner, £14.99 in UK