Saint Blaise

This has been a most interesting read. It combines insightful character development set against a detailed, well researched backdrop of life in South Africa during the years of the anti-apartheid movement and of the emergence of liberation theology. There cannot be many comparable fictional lives of a modern saint, and this combines some of the features of hagiography with what we expect in any novel of modern fiction. The various characters are portrayed sympathetically. It is not a long read, but is engaging, and the sort of book you do not want to put down. It is carefully crafted and shows insight into how a person grows, develops and learns. The attention to detail and the knowledge behind what is written do not go unnoticed.

Once again Robert Dewar has profoundly moved me with this elegantly written novel set in South Africa, Angola and Rhodesia, in the final decades of the last century. It is an atmospheric bildungsroman in which Blaise Cressingham - the titular character - from a wealthy, white, middle-class family, finds God and follows his faith to help amongst the poorest families in a sprawling black township. He faces death more than once, from Cuban mercenaries, and guerilla fighters, and very nearly becomes a Christian martyr. Here is a writer who understands life, and the workings of love and belief, and creates a poignant emotional truth, set against the real historical backdrop of a country torn apart by disgraceful racial laws, and a continent struggling to find peace and freedom in an age after colonialism. There are shocking scenes of brutal savagery but also heartlifting miracles in a story full of courageous acts of hope. This is a beautiful, devastating, brilliant book, by an author who continues to get better and better.

I have been an admirer of Robert Dewar's novels since his first one, 'Mallaig Road,' was published in early 2022, and it seems to me that his writing just gets better and better. In 'Saint Blaise' he breaks away from his earlier format - wherein he presents a view of 1960s and 1970s South African society from a generally white, apolitical perspective - and takes the reader deeper into the struggle against racial injustice in southern Africa from the mid-seventies onwards. The story follows the journey in faith of a young man born into Cape Town's social and economic elite at the height of Apartheid, and on this journey he becomes acquainted with tragedy, loss, trauma, and the terrible cost of war. As always, Robert Dewar's command of language, and the accuracy and vivid liveliness of the story's many and varied settings - Cape Town, Angola, the then Rhodesia, Johannesburg, Pretoria, and the sprawling black township of Guguletu outside Cape Town - are striking. Not everyone will like 'Saint Blaise.' "Too Catholic!" they will say. Yes, it is a 'Catholic novel' - as some of Evelyn Waugh's and Graham Greene's novels were 'Catholic novels,' but it is much more beside. I have given it a five star rating, and I know that in due course I will be re-reading it with just as much pleasure.