HARVEST OF THE SUN - Book review

E.V. Thompson’s third book in the Retallick Saga Harvest of the Sun was published in 1978. It’s a direct sequel of Chase the Wind. 

Josh Retallick and Miriam Thackeray with their young son Daniel are sailing to Australia when their ship is wrecked off the Skeleton Coast of South West Africa.

Their small party encounter the Bushmen who have survived in the harsh land and climate for thousands of years. At times of prolonged drought the Bushpeople would abandon newborn babies in order that the mother would survive. (p59).

Next they befriend the Herero tribesmen where they find a German missionary, Hugo Walder, whose ‘capacity for loving his fellow-men was as large as the frame that held his great heart’ (p98).                   

Josh, Miriam and Daniel live with the missionary and the Herero. They become hardened to the land and its people, treading with care where the neighbouring chief Jonker is concerned. And there is the chief’s vicious ally, the Boer Jacobus Albrecht to contend with as well. ‘Africa is a restless continent, ever changing and shifting in moods – a vast rumbling pot-pourri where fortunes swirl this way and that, like the sand shifting before the four winds’ (p133).

As this is a saga, the narrative – third-person omniscient – spans the period from the early 1840s to 1858. The family also befriends a Jewish trader Aaron and his daughter Hannah. By the time Daniel is seventeen he is an experienced tracker and good shot with a rifle. There are mining opportunities for Josh here too. Inevitably there are clashes between Jonker’s people and the Herero and Josh and his family are caught in between. The reader soon cares about these characters as they overcome a succession of travails, not least the neighbouring Zulu tribesmen, successors to the mighty Shaka. Sadly, good people succumb. Also, past events in their saga have a tendency to rear up and bite. There’s tension, suspense, humility, humanity, physical and geographical conflict, and great insights of the period and place. Indeed, Thompson repeatedly puts the reader in the scene and does not shirk from revealing the unpleasant gruesome aspects of the time along with the raw beauty of the land. This is history and as such needs no trigger warnings.

Any fans of H Rider Haggard or Wilbur Smith would appreciate this saga. The next instalment is Singing Spears (which I read out of order in 1990 and was the first Thompson book I’d read – and clearly not the last).