This is a large, capacious, generous novel which celebrates human staying power, courage and honesty. White Dog Fell from the Sky (Penguin), by Eleanor Morse is set in Botswana in 1977, and takes in the vast landscapes of that dry land - "this world of interminable blue sky, heat that scoured your brains clean".
It takes us to some remote places. It moves from the lives of the !Kung San (the name used in the novel), struggling to survive on the edge of the Kalahari, to an old woman digging for tubers in the sand, to the rather more comfortable lives of the expatriate community in Gaborone, to the stark terror of torture in an apartheid prison. Morse tackles these different experiences with an unflinching honesty.
The novel owes a great deal to the author's experience of living in Botswana in the mid-1970s. She is an American who lives on Peaks Island, Maine. This is her third novel (and the only one set in Africa). One senses that it must have been brewing in her mind for a long time. The setting (Botswana) enables her to move beyond the ordinary securities of suburban life. Her citing of Faulkner's Nobel address is a clue to her approach to the writing of fiction: "I wanted to write about the human heart, its losses and joys, its separations and connections".
This is an ambitious project, and the novel does not fail. Essentially, it is the story of three intersecting lives (the author admits that her novels are driven more by character than plot).
At the novel's centre is Alice Mendelssohn, an American who works for the Ministry of Local Government and Lands: her work partly explains her concern with the fate of the San/Bushmen (and in particular their claim to the land and to a way of life that has been theirs for thousands of years). Early on in the novel she discovers that her husband has been cheating on her (although their marriage seemed to be heading for failure anyway) and they separate.
