I enjoyed The Camp Whore and recommend it but I find it very difficult to review. I'm sure I'll re-read it later and revise this review but I want to get these first impressions down right away. This book was translated from the Afrikaans edition by Dominique Botha but I don't ascribe my review difficulties to that. Botha's English is smooth, flowing, and clear. Aside: I may order the Afrikaans edition as an aid to my personal interest in studying Afrikaans.
What's it about
The Camp Whore is based on the true story of Susan Nell who was brutally raped by two British officers and a joiner (ie collaborator) in a concentration camp near the end of the Anglo-Boer War. Thought to be dead, she survives and moves to the Netherlands where she becomes a psychiatric nurse. 16 years later during WWI, while serving at a military hospital for shell-shocked soldiers, she discovers that one of the patients is one of her rapists.
In structure, the chapters alternate between Susan Nell's first person account of what happened to her in South Africa and a present day third person narrative. The third person view is necessary to see what is happening to Susan.
What's my take
I started this book with a preconceived idea of what it would be about and it was totally different. Not a bad and disappointed sort of different, just that the author took a different approach than I expected. My notions about the book came from reading the Amazon blurb which describe it as "...a psychological thriller that will hold you in its icy grip till the very last page". Gripping to the last page I wholeheartedly agree with, but psychological thriller— as I understand the term— not at all.
This may be a bit of a spoiler but Susan's actual encounter with her rapist occupies a relatively small part of the book. For me, it is a much, much more.
Susan becomes a psychiatric nurse in response to what happened to her in the camp. She wants to brighten the life of others and "ensure that life triumphs". The Camp Whore is a deeply interior and reflective of her life. Her reason for leaving neutral Netherlands for a temporary posting in Devon in the UK is to study new techniques for treating psychological trauma. But there is something else going on.
There is a strange, vague sort of disquiet in her, not exactly to this country [England] and its war, but rather to her inability to connect fully on anything outside of herself. She is plagued by a persistent feeling that there is something else, just outside of view, that actually merits her attention.
It is this disquiet that propels her to come to terms with her war— which wasn't over for her when she went to England— and to claim her own story.
The author says that The Camp Whore is loosely based on Nico Moolman's novel The Boer Whore which was inspired by his conversation with a survivor from another war who came to think of Susan Nell as her mother. Sadly, an affordable copy of The Boer Whore is not available in the US because I'd really like to read more of Susan Nell's story.
The Boer War I don't know how much people in the US know about the Anglo-Boer War but it was a brutal conflict. Two South African States, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State went to war over the expansion of British influence in the region after the discovery of gold in the Transvaal. The British forces were initially overconfident that their superior numbers would quickly end the war, The Boers were able to maintain a successful guerrilla operation for several years. Eventually the British adopted a scorched earth policy, burning farms and moving families into concentration camps. The Boers were worn down by the massive numbers of British troops and the destruction of their lands.
Arthur Conan Doyle, of Sherlock Holmes fame, served in South Africa in a medical unit. The British army was accused of atrocities and war crimes, particularly in the establishment of concentration camps. Doyle became an apologist for the army conduct and wrote an pamphlet, The War in south Africa: Its Causes and Conductt which justified conduct during the war. Among other things, he rebranded the concentration camps as refugee camps. The British government was quite happy with Doyle's pamphlet and paid to have it printed for world-wide distribution and hopefully counter international condemnation. In response to Doyle's publication, one writer referred to him as "fictionist as historian". Most people probably think he was knighted for his Sherlock Holmes fiction but it was actually his support in print for the conduct of British troops during the war.
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