Adventure / Military Adventure
Farms and Drinkers
Combining Robert Louis Stevenson + Wilbur Smith | The Thin Red Line + All Quiet on the Western Front
Synopsis
A Rhodesian tobacco farmer recounts a six-week bush trip in 1977 with the eloquence of a man who has told the story many times — but the polish of his telling conceals the truth of what happened when his friend died in a Fire Force contact gone wrong.
Stevenson's polished retrospective narration and moral composure fused with Smith's visceral African landscape prose, structured through Jones's ensemble military perspectives and shaped by Remarque's themes of youth destroyed by war and the impossibility of return.
Behind the Story
A discussion between Robert Louis Stevenson and Wilbur Smith
Smith wanted to meet outdoors, naturally. He suggested a cattle farm outside Stellenbosch, a place owned by someone he knew — everyone in the Cape seemed to be someone he knew — where we could sit under a canopy of old oaks and look out at vineyards climbing the lower slopes of the Helderberg. The light in February is violent there, high-altitude sunlight that flattens shadows at noon, and Smith sat in it without flinching, his forearms brown and heavy on the table, a glass of pinotage…
Read the full discussionThe Formula
- First-person retrospective narration throughout — the composed, polished voice of a man arranging memory into legible moral shape
- Compressed character portraits that seem transparent but conceal: 'Pieter was a big man who moved quietly, which is the most disconcerting combination in a soldier'
- The narrator's literary precision in the contact scene, where Stevensonian composure smooths over the moments of deepest terror and failure
- Moral architecture that appears to organize events into clean meaning — the narrator's conviction that a well-told story is a true story
- The African bush rendered as active force — mopane turpentine, red dust, the Alouette downdraft, the violence of high-altitude sunlight
- Kinetic Fire Force sequences with bodies in motion: the helicopter insertion, the sweep line, the ground underfoot
- The mopane worm scene — body-knowledge, physical specificity, the hands and the pressure and the green frass
- Men revealed through gesture rather than psychology: how Pieter holds the MAG, whether Toombs flinches, Ndlovu's silence
- Ensemble military perspectives filtered through one consciousness — Toombs on the radio, Ndlovu moving without sound, the K-Car overhead, each man registered partially through the narrator's fractured attention
- The company as dysfunctional family — four men in a stick, their relationships specific rather than archetypal
- The cycling between perspectives during the contact scene, where the narrator's access to others is limited to faces, voices, and movement at the edge of vision
- The impossibility of return — Rory on his veranda twenty years later, alive and farming and drinking, unable to access the self that existed before 1977
- Camaraderie as the only truth the war does not corrupt — the love for Pieter, for Ndlovu's hands, for Toombs reading by torchlight
- The gap between the story told at home and the story that actually happened — the narrator's fluency as the mirror image of Paul Baumer's silence
- The destruction of youth rendered not as dramatic collapse but as quiet replacement — the young man erased and a farmer installed in his place
Reader Reviews
The leadwood tree — dead for three hundred years, still standing in the exact posture of a living tree — is the image this story is built around, and the narrator never once explains the parallel. That restraint is what makes this work. The real story is in the gap between what the narrator claims to remember clearly and what he cannot bring himself to say. Toombs's comment about Pieter is the hinge: 'Funny how it goes. Pieter moves and everyone else is still counting their fingers.' The narrator insists this was praise. The reader understands it might have been something else entirely. Devastating.
55 found this helpful
A technically accomplished piece that is almost too aware of its own accomplishment. The narrator's voice — the polished retrospective, the careful disclaimers about precision — does important work: it enacts the self-deception it describes. That much is genuinely good. The mopane worm scene, where Ndlovu teaches the narrator to gut a caterpillar, is the best writing here, and it's no accident that it's the moment where the racial and military hierarchies briefly invert. But the story never fully reckons with the politics of what it depicts. Ndlovu dies offscreen in 1983 'of causes I did not ask about,' and the narrator's failure to ask is presented as characterisation rather than confronted as complicity. The Rhodesian war was not merely a backdrop for white grief, and this story, for all its craft, cannot quite escape that framing.
42 found this helpful
I came in expecting genre military fiction and found something considerably more interesting. The unreliable narrator conceit is handled with real sophistication — the narrator's insistence on clarity ('I want to be precise,' 'I want to be clear') is the tell, and the story trusts the reader to hear the desperation beneath the composure. The prose is strong without being showy: 'the bush swallowed the helicopter sound within thirty paces' does more atmospheric work than most writers manage in a page. The mopane worm scene is the best thing here — sensory, intimate, structurally necessary. I'd have cut the leadwood tree passage, which makes the metaphor a shade too legible, but that's a quibble against writing that's operating well above the genre baseline.
37 found this helpful
A carefully constructed war narrative that succeeds largely through what it withholds. The narrator presents himself as a man committed to clarity and precision, but the reader gradually realises his eloquence is itself a form of evasion. The structure supports this: the 'clean' first contact is described fully so we trust the narrator before the second contact reveals the limits of that trust. The mopane worm passage is beautiful writing — 'the kind of knowledge that lived in the hands, not the head' — and serves as the story's emotional core. My one reservation is the Toombs subplot, which feels slightly underdeveloped. But the closing image of warm gin as a barrier against silence is quietly perfect.
31 found this helpful
Superb military detail throughout. The Fire Force procedures are correct — the K-Car orbiting with the 20mm, the G-Car insertion, the stick organisation, even the contact report written on the knee in the Alouette. Someone has done their homework. The FN MAG with the filed trigger guard is the sort of detail that separates research from knowledge. What elevates it beyond a solid war account is the narrator's composure, which the story quietly indicts without ever breaking character. The MAG still on the stretcher — that image will stay with me. Generous four stars; it earns every one.
28 found this helpful
The register is remarkable — a first-person voice that sustains its formal, slightly archaic cadence across the full length without a single break in tone. Sentences like 'the boredom was its own kind of violence' and 'the bush was information, not experience' earn their compression through the accumulated rhythmic precision of everything around them. The translator in me notes how carefully the syntax mirrors the narrator's psychological state: long, controlled subordinate clauses when he is composing memory, then the short blunt sentences when Pieter is hit. 'Pieter died. I held him.' That shift does more than any adjective could.
22 found this helpful
The period details check out — RLI national service, Fire Force tactics, the Alouette G-Cars, Selous Scouts secondments, the Mount Darwin operational area. Even the Castle lagers are right. The friendship between the narrator and Pieter is beautifully drawn without a shred of sentimentality: the filed trigger guard, the generous laugh, the magnificent disgust at the mopane worm. The only thing that stung was Ndlovu's death handled in a single sentence. The man deserved more than 'He died in 1983, of causes I did not ask about.' Though I suspect that's rather the point.
18 found this helpful
This one grabbed me by the collar and didn't let go. The voice is the thing — that measured, slightly too-polished way the man talks, like someone who's rehearsed the story so many times the rehearsal has become the memory. And then that last paragraph about the gin and having nothing in your hands. Read it twice. You know a story's working when a man drinking warm gin on a veranda makes your throat tight.
14 found this helpful
Good firefight scenes but honestly there's a lot of talking in between. The second contact where Pieter gets hit is intense. Could've used more action and less philosophizing about trees.
3 found this helpful