Justice will prevail
I read a book on the weekend titled: The Rainbow has no Pink
Published in 2008, it's a fictionalised account of Dr Aubrey Levin's heinous experiments with soldiers when he headed up the Apartheid South African Defence Force's Psychiatric wing.
It is an exceptionally good read. Besides my obvious interest in the setting, it is a finely crafted detective novel, and well deserved it's Citizen Book of the Year Award. Highly recommended.
My only gripe with the book is that I think it was wrongly titled. It is not a story about gays. Although the protagonist ends up having a sex change operation inflicted on him by Dr Andre Blignaut (aka Aubrey Levin) he was never gay to start with. It is really about how screwed up the last years of the Apartheid regime were, how sick and warped a lot of the top people in the army were, and how white boys were also the victims of gross human rights abuses.
The book ends depressingly, with a total failure of justice. When the book was penned the facts certainly seemed that way - Levin was safely ensconced in Canada, and his sinister past had been pretty much swept under the carpet. Thankfully, that is all about to change...
How many films end on a depressing note?
ReplyDeleteI can think of only three books out of the few that I have read that end depressingly. "The Great Gatsby","For Whom the Bell Tolls" and "Catcher in the Rye". It perhaps the sucker punch at the end that leaves the reader cold and wishing for the comfort of the happy ending, thus causing the book to stand out from the rest.
WBF - Maybe the depressed ending books are more realistic. After all... "and they lived happily ever after" is the stuff of fairy tales
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