My Review of You Will Be Safe Here by Damian Barr

It is impossible to praise Damian Barr enough for the jaw droppingly good You Will Be Safe Here... I defy anyone to read it and not be moved to tears as I was.

It is a sad novel for how could it not be with the subject matter of camps with involuntary inmates? But, and it's an important but, it is also a novel of love and the nourishment it provides in the darkest of times. 

Ultimately Barr shows us that if there is love there is the hope of something better to come. This is noticeable with Sarah van der Watt, a Boer housewife sent to the Bloemfontein Concentration Camp in 1901. Written in diary form, the epistolary account begins with Sarah's account of waiting at home as the British burn their way ever closer to and destroy her home.  The British are so quintessentially so with their notification of arrival and the first soldier arriving on a bicycle and as such provide some grim humour as one gets a glimpse as to how the British appear to others. Sarah, and her son Fred, are removed to the camp as the possessions of her husband Samuel, they are in effect chattels but not as much as Jacob and Lettie, their black servants. The sanitised violence visited upon them by the British soldiers is harrowing. They are oh so politely treated as animals or worse and tied up with the van der Watts furniture ... As if this isn't traumatic enough Sarah then provides a searingly painful account of the new normality of the deprivations of the journey to the camp on a crowded train to the horrors that await her in Bloemfontein. Barr spares no punches as the worst aspects of human nature are laid bare.

Human beings being treated inhumanely occurs in the second narrative also which focuses ultimately on the life of Willem Brandt and was inspired by the true story of Raymond Buys. At sixteen he's sent to a military style camp by a macho stepfather with the intention of the General their being able to sort him out. The bullying that goes on there is stomach turning but I found it most disturbing that ultimately it was an extension of what Willem had had to endure all of his life. Again, there is still love though even when Willem believes there is not. Barr allows the reader to have hope for Willem even when Willem has given up. 

A final thought has to be on the beauty of love through friendship as exhibited between Sarah and a friend, Helen, she makes in the camp. There's a parallel friend for Willem in the guise of Guildenhuys. Both protagonists are indebted to their friends for their very survival and Barr reminds us that love is love in whatever form it presents itself.

Bravo Damian Barr on a masterpiece.

Thanks to Anne Cater for inviting me to be part of this magnificent tour.