Gillian Slovo / R4 / BookClub

This summer I was part of the audience for Radio 4’s ‘Bookclub’ with Gillian Slovo, author of Red Dust. It’s a decent book about a young South African lawyer, torture, apartheid, generational shifts, truth, love, justice etc… I hadn’t heard of her father Joe Slovo before the interview, but she comes from interesting stock. Her mother, Ruth First, was murdered by a parcel bomb in 1982. It’s often tenacious ground interviewing the child of famous people, because they rarely have the integrity, insight or talent of their parents. Luckily, Slovo has written a thriller with an ambiguous ending and an interesting point of tension between the main character and her Old School mentor: the former is a prosecution lawyer, the latter has always been defence. Is one position inherently better than the other? Are you somehow ’siding with the law’ if you aim to prosecute someone? Are you unsympathetic to all the social and economic factors that brings a person to the stand? And what if the person you’re prosecuting says they were tortured? And what if that torture extracted a true confession?

On that note, Christopher Hitchens  being voluntarily tortured:

A show on the BBC, ‘The Torturer’s Tale’ which tracked down torturers willing to speak about their experience.

And Thomas Glave’s story The Torturer’s Wife.

Anyway, I asked a few questions and hopefully one of them was good enough to remain in the final show which airs on Sunday 4th October, at 4pm.