Gold Never Rusts
Paul-Constant Smit
Penguin
Review:
Jennifer Crocker
YOU could, I suppose, in all honestly call this a sweeping novel. It starts with a prologue set in 988BC when an expeditionary group led by General Sri has been stricken by a poisoned arrow. He has a precious parcel he wants a young man who is travelling with them to take back to his queen.
Moving into the book we meet Con Slaughter, a young adventurer who has come to Africa to make his fortune. Slaughter is from North America, but he has grown up in the school of hard knocks – he knows how to ride a horse in the wild and how to look after himself.
He is running from a secret that killed his family and nearly killed him, but he doesn’t even know what the secret really is. A large portion of his life will be spent learning who he can trust and who is playing him to get their hands on a secret document. Then we have the narrative of a later time when Vasco da Gama touches African soil and cheats his men and his country. It’s almost all about gold fever really over the ages.
Paul-Constant Smit has pulled together a narrative that holds together, even at times when it becomes a little historically confusing. Through his characters and the unlikely alliances he makes, he takes Con from being a prospector who strikes it lucky and becomes a Rand Lord, but not without deep personal cost to himself.
The Boer War, or the South African War, forms part of the sweeping narrative, it is incorporated well into the bigger history of the book.
You don’t have to be extremely interested in gold, war or history in order to enjoy this lengthy novel, the characters and the landscape are well sketched and convey a story that is interesting.
There is, however, much history to be enjoyed in the book, even if fictional, and the ending has a slightly manufactured feeling that doesn’t totally do justice to the sense of veracity the first part of the book convey. Still, I enjoyed it.