It is not surprising, therefore, that the most interesting parts of Brink's new book are precisely those in which he writes about his initial, unfocused attempts, first as a boy and then as a young man, to find a path of his own out of the ways of living and thinking - at once brutal and fearful - that had become characteristic of the beleaguered national group to which he himself belonged. For it had always been an ironic aspect of Afrikaner history that they too had invariably felt entitled to look on themselves as victims. From the beginning of the settlement of the Cape by the Dutch, they had struggled to establish their mastery over the indigenous black majority, whom they had eventually defeated. Then they had had to fight against the might of imperial Britain to which-both before and after the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902)-they eventually found themselves subordinate. Victimhood, in other words, was an indefeasible part of their legacy too.

How, in the later years of the 20th century, was one to make sense of such a predicament? Where was a sensitive and bookish young man to find a footing of his own? Basically, as Brink says of his return to South Africa after a long absence abroad, "I did not want to be here" (his italics). He yearned instead for the freedom he had enjoyed in Europe, rather than for a renewed immersion in the bleak, constricted politics of his homeland. In consequence he was to find his companions chiefly among fellow-dissidents - Afrikaners, English-speakers, "Cape Coloureds", blacks - all of them living in the same kind of no-man's-land as himself. And all, in due course, coming under severe pressure from the increasingly baffled (yet always threatening and violent) state machinery. Brink himself was never jailed, but many of his friends were, and a variety of unsuccessful dirty tricks were played out by the authorities against himself and his companions. However, by then it was becoming increasingly clear, even to the leaders of the nationalist government, that their claim to be regarded and hence fostered from abroad, as a bastion of "white civilisation" roused nothing but scorn from the world outside.

It has to be said that the interest to be got out of Brink's memoir declines rapidly once this stage in his own history, and his country's history, has been surpassed. From then on, his book becomes a somewhat boastful rigmarole of love affairs in various countries, accounts of the success enjoyed by some of his novels, descriptions of drunken writers' gatherings and so on. I would have preferred to have learned more about his childhood in the harsh uplands of the Orange Free State, and of his experiences as a teacher of English literature at Rhodes University: an institution solemnly named after Cecil John Rhodes, who was the greatest of the British empire-builders of his time and (in his own fashion) as mad as any of the other claimants to the sub-continent.