This Day and Age

by Mike Nicol

Overview

With tremendous political daring, South African novelist Mike Nicol offers a luminous parable of his country's past. Bawdy and terrifying, fantastical yet eerily familiar, This Day and Age realizes the prophecy told to a newly elected president on the eve of his inauguration. After years of bountiful harmony will come plague and famine, during which a strange man-child with a Bible chained to his wrist and his army of the disenfranchised will gather strength in the most remote reaches of the land.

"Mike Nicol joins the roster . . . of Franz Kafka, Mikhail Bulgakov, Ryszard Kapuscinski, and the magical realists of Latin America."--The New York Times Book Review

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679742005
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/01/1995
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1951, Mike Nicol is the author of several novels, among them Horseman, This Day and Age, and The Powers That Be, and many works of nonfiction, including A Good-Looking Corpse and The Waiting Country. He lives in Muizenberg, South Africa.

Editorial Reviews

Justice prevails with biblical inevitability in this dazzling, variously textured political fiction from South African Nicol ( The Powers That Be ; A Good-Looking Corpse ). Or does it? The novel's two story lines send signals like satellite beams between themselves and to the reader: one involves characters, setting, plot, and typical narrative inventions of all fiction; the other is an inquiry into the nature of storytelling itself, whatever form it takes, and how various versions of happenings reflect, distort and shape the ``truth.'' The main character is charismatic Enoch Mistas, a black religious visionary from the plague-afflicted, poverty-stricken veld, who is alternately larger than life among his growing flock of believers and conspicuous in his absence, impossible for hostile authorities to capture or kill. The narrative consists of layered tales, appearing as fortunes told by seers, letters to the editor of the premier national newspaper, children's rhymes, diary entries, military dispatches, love songs, and more. Recurring portents so obvious to the uneducated are invisible to sophisticates and never figure in official accounts: ``. . . often history records only what it wants to, never mentions the cries of peacocks or the resonance of butterfly wings.'' From the president (whose ``bum-boils''--another sign of upcoming disaster?--are manifested early in this novel) to Ma-Fatsoen and Fat Eddie (villager parents of Enoch Mistas), the characters here are memorable as individuals and as supporting players in the ever-developing apocalyptic saga of the Mistas cult. This beautifully crafted, timely and disturbing fable offers much wisdom to thoughtful readers and/or governments concerned with peace and a better future. Nicol reveals the ultimate ``truth'' of ``what happened or what may have happened or what people heard happened'': ``Afterwards is where the story begins.'' (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

South African novelist Nicol follows the magic realism of his first book, The Powers That Be (Atlantic Monthly, 1989), with a bleak and brutal political fable. In an unnamed country much like South Africa, an oracle warns the new president that a murderous messiah will soon appear among the oppressed masses. Years later, Enoch Mistas, a Bible chained to his wrist, stands at the gates of the city with an army of homosexual ex-convicts. Mistas preaches equality and peace but is profoundly misogynistic and as bloodthirsty as the government he opposes. Traveling with this ``redeemer'' is British explorer P.T. George, who has abandoned his youthful Darwinian optimism for a fatalistic historical determinism that author Nicol apparently shares. A well-written novel packed with historical allusions; recommended for public libraries.-- Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles

Library Journal