Theodore Blanchaille is searching for the missing millions of the Boer leader Paul Kruger, and his lost city of gold. As a child he had heard tales of Kruger from a wayward priest; what follows is an astonishing journey that takes Blanchaille through a landscape peopled with spies, visionaries, terrorists, traitors, patriots and exiled presidents. From huge transit camps on the veld to a notorious prison block, from a township in the bloody aftermath of 'pacification' to a secret travellers' rest for fleeing pilgrims, and ...
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Theodore Blanchaille is searching for the missing millions of the Boer leader Paul Kruger, and his lost city of gold. As a child he had heard tales of Kruger from a wayward priest; what follows is an astonishing journey that takes Blanchaille through a landscape peopled with spies, visionaries, terrorists, traitors, patriots and exiled presidents. From huge transit camps on the veld to a notorious prison block, from a township in the bloody aftermath of 'pacification' to a secret travellers' rest for fleeing pilgrims, and from the streets and cellars of Soho to paradise at last on a Swiss mountainside, Kruger's Alp is a fantastical political satire of extraordinary invention.
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New York. 1985. April 1985. Viking Press. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0670804150. Winner of the Whitbread Award. 279 pages. hardcover. Jacket painting by Hodges Soileau. Jacket design by Neil Stuart. keywords: Literature South Africa. FROM THE PUBLISHER-KRUGER'S ALP is a satirical fantasy of extraordinary invention and power, built around the legends, the people, and the political realities of South Africa. The novel is the story of the priestly renegade Theodore Blanchaille, and of his search for the missing treasure taken out of South Africa by the Boer leader Paul Kruger. The search begins in childhood with the gilded tales a wayward priest, Father Lynch, tells to his altar boys under the Tree of Heaven, and it takes Blanchaille from huge transit camps on the veld to a notorious prison tower block in the city, from a township in the bloody aftermath of ‘pacification' to a secret travelers' rest for fleeing pilgrims, and then-as the search moves to Europe and America-from the streets and cellars of London's Soho to paradise on a Swiss mountainside and to the city of brotherly love, Philadelphia. For Blanchaille, it is an astonishing journey of revelation through an exotic landscape peopled with spies, visionaries, terrorists, traitors, patriots, and exiled presidents-a journey in which betrayal, disillusion, and vicious assault lie in wait for him. As the last of Father Lynch's altar boys fulfills his destiny, the truth behind the cherished legend of a broken tribe is finally made plain. Christopher Hope has conceived a brilliant book-a blackly comic vision of the yolk on their last trek home-rooted in the history and politics of a nation and embellished with savage and apocalyptic wit. CHRISTOPHER HOPE was born in Johannesburg. His first book of poems, CAPE DRIVES (1974), received the Cholmondeley Award. His first novel, A SEPARATE DEVELOPMENT, banned for a period shortly after its publication in South Africa in 1980, received the David Higham Prize for Fiction. A collection of his stories, PRIVATE PARTS & OTHER TALES (1982), won the International P.E.N. Silver Pen Award. Kruger's Alp received the 1984 Whitbread Award. Mr. Hope has lived in London since 1976. inventory #4743.