In her first novel, The Boy Next Door, which won the Orange award for new writers in 2010, Irene Sabatini created two unforgettable fictional characters who leapt off the page. Set in newly independent Zimbabwe, the novel charted the unlikely 20-year relationship between “coloured” Lindiwe, and Ian, a white “Rhodie”. The dynamics and difficulties of their love affair were a symbolic working out of the racial conflicts of a country still living with the legacy of apartheid. Sabatini’s great skill was to create complex and charismatic characters whose love for each other survived racist perceptions and racial constructs.
In this, her second novel, she has produced another fictional dynamo, 10-year-old Roberto, who narrates with such charm it’s hard not to fall in love with him. Roberto is a delightful mix of young and old. His hyperactive imagination and innocence are in some ways that of a much younger child. For example, he wonders if he can manipulate his scary, mysterious elderly neighbour Monsieur Renoir to carry out physical actions just by thought alone, asking his mother, “Mum, can you murder someone by thinking?” But his vocabulary and precocious insights also belie his years, with an awareness of concepts such as democracy and anarchy.
Roberto lives in Switzerland with his family, and through him we see them. The Zimbabwean writer-mother who is working on a novel about “literary vampires”, which she ditches because she can’t get them to think deeply enough. His Italian father, who works for the Red Cross, and is always jetting off to political hotspots in eastern Europe. Roberto’s fictional co‑star is his teenage, afro-sporting, footballer brother who is obsessed with being cool and a local heartthrob to girls. This being a middle-class Swiss-based family, George is also learning Mandarin at his private school in Geneva. Although Roberto is the butt of his older brother’s constant teasing, the affection they have for each other is palpable. Indeed, the family relationships are very real and often very funny thanks to Sabatini’s impressive ability to render them through Roberto’s 10-year-old gaze.
Still, this isn’t just a feel-good, character-driven novel. Two political plotlines add suspense. When the intensely curious Roberto gets on the case, it emerges that Monsieur Renoir has been involved in the shady history of a stolen Victoria Cross medal, the poaching trade in Africa, and the British massacre of Kenya’s anti-colonial Mau Mau rebels in the 1950s. And Aunt Delphia brings to life the horrors of Zimbabwe under Mugabe, whom the family scathingly refer to as “Bob the Butternut”. Roberto tells us he has to be “deprogrammed” from being so irreverent on family trips back to Zimbabwe. We eventually learn that Aunt Delphia has paid a terrible price for speaking out against Mugabe’s dictatorship, the repercussions of which are deftly interwoven into the narrative.
This is a wonderfully enjoyable and heart-warming novel with intergenerational appeal. It captures the perspective of a young boy edging his way towards a more adult understanding of the injustices and moral dilemmas of the world at large.
• Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr Loverman is published by Hamish Hamilton. To order Peace and Conflict for £5.59 (RRP £6.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.
