Riotous Assembly

The four-barrel elephant gun that makes an appearance early in this Tom Sharpe novel devastates everyone (and every tree and shrub and hillock) in its path. That is a good metaphor for what Sharpe is about in savagely satirizing South African apartheid society. But the modern reader should not laugh too loudly or tut-tut too sternly: Innocent people condemned to death, unwarranted surveillance in the name of fighting terrorists, and official cover-ups are not unknown in the more "enlightened" quarters of the globe today.