The Lie of the Land

In this entertaining historical adventure novel, Jaspar D. Utley, sets a touching, interracial, love story against the backdrop of the genocidal atrocities perpetrated in South West Africa by the Germans in their war against the Ovaherro and Numa, and shows how the brutalities of Shark Island before the Great War, horrifying in their own right, were also a presage of the later biological genocide of the Nazis. At its heart, this story is a romance, told in the first person, between Sam, a British undercover agent, and Leah, a beautiful Numa girl, relating how the former uses all the covert skills he had learnt in the Boer War to try to rescue the latter from certain death, either through work and starvation or by murder. What raises this novel above the usual adventure yarn is not only Utley's determination to place his tale within the context of German genocide, but also his evident love for what is now Namibia and its people, evoking the environment, geography and topography of German South West Africa and showing a fine sense of the native fauna and flora. One can easily imagine the arid heat and punishing winds, but also the beauty of the wildlife that struggles to flourish in so superficially an inhospitable climate. The hero is very much in the Richard Hannay mould, young and daring, but he has a less traditional back-story that allows the author to explore the contrasting colonial policies of the British and Germans in southern Africa from the viewpoint of one who stands as a force for moral good in an age of bestial criminality perpetrated by so-called civilised Europeans, but who also feels he does not quite belong to either nation, although culturally infused by both. So, Sam, while subjectively involved in his passion for Leah, retains an objectivity with regard to the political situations in which he finds himself, that strengthens the impact upon the reader of his horror at the barbarism he encounters. Utley's narration finely conveys a sense of youthful idealism and optimism that is cruelly confronted, but not entirely confounded, by tragedy, and by the horrors he encounters in pursuit, firstly, of his mission, and then his love. His dark experiences lead him to conclude, in a profundity that might stand for humanity's reaction to the atrocities of the twentieth century: "...I wondered yet again how easy it was for the unthinkable to become possible." (p.137) This is an ambitious book, combining a non-traditional, cross-cultural love story with an historical relation of the 'Kaiser's Holocaust' that seamlessly weaves real people into the life of the protagonist, but Utley, all within the setting of a colonial background and the geopolitical context of pre-First World War Europe and Africa, successfully pulls it off, before, in a teaser epilogue priming his reader for Sam's future exploits in the equally contested world of Ottoman Jerusalem. This, one hopes, is just the beginning of further Buchanesque adventures in the last age of the imperialist 'Great Game', with Sam a suitably developed and likeable hero. Finally, the book comes with a useful map, notes, and a bibliography for anyone captured by the story who wants to explore the little known, in Britain anyway, history of the holocaust of the Namibian peoples by German barbarism. This novel is to be recommended to all who enjoy their fiction to be grounded in historical reality.

I expected an exciting spy story, but it was much more. The brutality of the events are interwoven with the beautiful landscape and an increasingly appealing protagonist as the novel progresses. It's a quick read because you won't put it down!

A really good read full of adventure , excitement but most of all history. I had no idea of what happened in Namibia . It was informative and interesting at the same time.

Great - written by a friend, so it has to be ...!

A gripping page turner packed with historical detail.

In this entertaining historical adventure novel, Jaspar D. Utley, sets a touching, interracial, love story against the backdrop of the genocidal atrocities perpetrated in South West Africa by the Germans in their war against the Ovaherro and Numa, and shows how the brutalities of Shark Island before the Great War, horrifying in their own right, were also a presage of the later biological genocide of the Nazis.At its heart, this story is a romance, told in the first person, between Sam, a British undercover agent, and Leah, a beautiful Numa girl, relating how the former uses all the covert skills he had learnt in the Boer War to try to rescue the latter from certain death, either through work and starvation or by murder. What raises this novel above the usual adventure yarn is not only Utley's determination to place his tale within the context of German genocide, but also his evident love for what is now Namibia and its people, evoking the environment, geography and topography of German South West Africa and showing a fine sense of the native fauna and flora. One can easily imagine the arid heat and punishing winds, but also the beauty of the wildlife that struggles to flourish in so superficially an inhospitable climate.The hero is very much in the Richard Hannay mould, young and daring, but he has a less traditional back-story that allows the author to explore the contrasting colonial policies of the British and Germans in southern Africa from the viewpoint of one who stands as a force for moral good in an age of bestial criminality perpetrated by so-called civilised Europeans, but who also feels he does not quite belong to either nation, although culturally infused by both. So, Sam, while subjectively involved in his passion for Leah, retains an objectivity with regard to the political situations in which he finds himself, that strengthens the impact upon the reader of his horror at the barbarism he encounters. Utley's narration finely conveys a sense of youthful idealism and optimism that is cruelly confronted, but not entirely confounded, by tragedy, and by the horrors he encounters in pursuit, firstly, of his mission, and then his love. His dark experiences lead him to conclude, in a profundity that might stand for humanity's reaction to the atrocities of the twentieth century: "...I wondered yet again how easy it was for the unthinkable to become possible." (p.137)This is an ambitious book, combining a non-traditional, cross-cultural love story with an historical relation of the 'Kaiser's Holocaust' that seamlessly weaves real people into the life of the protagonist, but Utley, all within the setting of a colonial background and the geopolitical context of pre-First World War Europe and Africa, successfully pulls it off, before, in a teaser epilogue priming his reader for Sam's future exploits in the equally contested world of Ottoman Jerusalem. This, one hopes, is just the beginning of further Buchanesque adventures in the last age of the imperialist 'Great Game', with Sam a suitably developed and likeable hero.Finally, the book comes with a useful map, notes, and a bibliography for anyone captured by the story who wants to explore the little known, in Britain anyway, history of the holocaust of the Namibian peoples by German barbarism. This novel is to be recommended to all who enjoy their fiction to be grounded in historical reality.