Reviews: The Tin Heart Gold Mine
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An intelligent and complex study of human behaviour in difficult circumstances
It would be easy to underestimate this book. On one level it is a complicated 3-way love story with a somewhat naïve and idealistic heroine falling for the wrong man; but it is about more than that. At heart it is a meditation on growing up and learning from experience; on catharsis and making the best choices in difficult circumstances, often involving compromises that will please no one. It is about loyalty and trust (well judged or misplaced). It is also about the damaging effects of war; how banal revenge and brutality damages innocents and how that damage is sustained and causes more unnecessary suffering decades later; how the trauma of one child can indirectly impact on to another child decades later if the adults involved do not make a conscious effort to break the chain.
The book draws on the author’s own experiences in Zimbabwe and Zambia, although she roots part of the story in London so that an interest in Africa doesn’t become a criterion for the reader to pick up the book or not. I know the author personally and I started reading the book because of that; but I finished it because I enjoyed it. It’s extremely well constructed and well written; and deserves to be better known.
The Thrill and the Poetry of The Tin Heart Gold Mine
I read The Tin Heart Gold Mine in one sitting. It was such a rich and complex story that, once in, I knew the only way out lay at the other end! I then needed to sit with the story for a few days, avoiding reading any other novel, while I mulled over what exactly had affected me.
First of all, I loved the descriptions of the African bush, and of the hard work and constant learning that are necessary to survive and succeed there. They fanned into flame my ever-present longing to be back there, under that wide African sky. Because these descriptions are so detailed, they are relatable, certainly to anyone who has lived in, or even only visited, Africa, and probably too to those who have not yet been there. These contextual pieces work strongly to ground the story in a convincing reality. Yes, it is set in the fictional country of 'Chambeshi', but you can smell the dawn air and feel the sandy soil beneath your feet... you soon replace that name in your own head with a real one that you know!
When they reached the bridge across the great river, the guards were half asleep, warming themselves at a smoky fire by the sentry box. They waved Lara and Jason across, and in those brief moments the river surface was transformed from shadowed grey to opalescent pearl. The first birds began to call and the first water creatures made the river's edges ripple and the reeds stir. They savoured the smell of the river, moist and fresh, the rank stench of decayed plants on its banks, the sweetly powerful and comforting odour of animal dung, the taste of the dry dust of the road rising up in yellow-grey clouds behind them, the clarity of every sound, the increasing sharpness of every sight around and about them. Early morning in the bush was to Lara a song of praise, a precious gift of life. This was a moment of such beauty that no artist could capture it. That it existed at all was sufficient. The two of them, herself and Jason, were the only humans in Eden and it had been made for their delight.1
That romantic text evokes the young Lara's rose-coloured vision of the bush and her new love. Having shared that with her, the reader is bound also to share her discomfort when she discovers that the wild bush is not all dawn and birdsong. It hides some dismaying secrets, such as The Tin Heart Gold Mine that gives its name to the story:
The heat of the African bush is oppressive at midday, but it is green and still without obvious movement. All living creatures hide in the darkest shade they can find. They are followed by flies and biting insects whose incessant hum and buzz quieten as they settle down to feast on animal blood. The mine site, however, was an organised monster of rusted metal rearing its hoists and gears up over the grills and boxes that guarded the pumps and mine shaft. It stood menacingly in the midst of a great open sore of bare and empty earth that ate its way into the surrounding forest. Lara felt it might move, that it was alive with some vile and sinister spite. On the tree line skulked two grim grey shapes made of concrete blocks and roofed with corrugated iron sheets. The heat and devastation of the place, intensified by its burning hot metal structure, made Lara's head ache.2
When Lara then discovers the tin heart itself, for which the mine is named, and the tiny cemetery it guards, her meditation on 'this symbol of undying love that was no longer remembered or seen by anyone'3 opens a window on some of the forgotten history of colonial force, showing in microcosm how World War One scarred not only Europe, but also Africa, and against which Africa fought back by destroying its agents.
Secondly, it was a rare pleasure to find so much knowledgeable discussion of art, artists and the artistic process, layered into the story completely naturally, because the main character, Lara, is an artist. A youthful, just-beginning-to-be successful artist, with just enough sophistication and privilege to be introduced to a wide range of actors in Chambeshi City, but with yet much to learn about life and love, she is in many ways an ideal protagonist for this particular story. I found convincing her emergence into self-knowledge and adulthood; her struggle to define for herself what it means to be an artist and to take responsibility for her choices. There is also a satisfying irony (or... possibly no irony at all, depending on your conclusions at the end of the story) in the placing of this advice to Lara in the mouth of the unfathomable Oscar:
"I'm not being romantic about art and the bohemian lifestyle artists are supposed to want," Oscar said. "The world has a way of not turning out as one expects and there is no morality in the way it works. Of course you need to make a living, but it is not the same thing as making art. I have seen artists whose work was at one time considered subversive and politically dangerous so they were prevented from making art in their own personal way. Those artists couldn't change their way of seeing the world and making art — oh yes, some did give up and try to paint differently, but they were the ones who usually suffered most, because they lost their souls. You mustn't betray yourself, Lara, even if you betray other people."4
Thirdly, another aspect of Lara's character that I found persuasive was her gradually developing awareness that, although the liberal ethos of her elite boarding school in Africa had enabled her to take for granted friendships with people of other races and classes, this was not the same as political awareness, which only began to dawn for her at art school in London.
When she and Liseli were home together for their first English summer vacation in the winter of Chambeshi, Lara started to tell Liseli about her encounters with the class system. There was something in the brightness of Liseli's eye, the way her attention sharpened and a certain irony in her expression that made Lara stop.
"Shit," she said in her newly-acquired art school fashion, "It's always been like that for you, hasn't it?"5
I have some similar background, having been born in Africa, having spent my high school years at a good boarding school in Africa, and having had the privilege of being white and middle class, with more options for self-determination, for international travel, and for extricating myself from politically uncomfortable situations, than most other Africans had at the time. A mistake often made by people who have not shared this experience is to think that the existence of these options means that such a protagonist would not have a story worth telling, or would always choose to escape at the first opportunity, just because they can. As always, humans are more complex than that. The story played out in 'Chambeshi' is a true story of Africa: humans living, growing, choosing, relating, and sometimes dying violently, in a land both rich and harsh, amongst a web of people of different backgrounds and countries, with different agendas and often mixed motivations, including idealism, greed, fear, autonomy and love. Lara may be fictional, but she stands for one of those very real people who have actually lived there.
And then there is the story itself. All my talk of background, art and character might make a potential reader think the whole book either a philosophical treatise or a poetic type of African chick lit. Far from it. Some poignant moments in the story are beautifully evoked, such as when Lara is alone with her child in London after Tim leaves for Africa, and 'the winter darkness leans in and breathes on the windows'6, or when 'she begins to feel that she is floating rootless above her own life.'7 But there is at the heart of the novel a really gripping story, with twists and turns and a build-up of pressure towards the end, made all the more thrilling precisely due to the author's skill in introducing one by one the characters who will be affected, enabling you to care about them to the same extent that Lara does in each case. The actual elements of the story must of course be left undiscussed to avoid spoilers. It's enough to say that love, sex, betrayal, insurgency and revolution touch and, in most cases, permanently change their lives.
And the storytelling is riveting. Lara's two crazy drives for her life are nail-biting. In the first drive, there is a surreal moment as she passes the university while temporarily the unwilling leader of a convoy from Chambeshi airport back to a city rocked by protests that are being violently suppressed by the authorities. The simplicity and terrible beauty of this description lingered with me. I was only able to interpret it some moments after reading it, pretty much as it is implied Lara does, because her main attention is on managing the vehicle to survive the drive:
In their brightly coloured clothes, the boys with clean white shirts, the girls with pretty skirts, they seemed to dance and fall like flowers in a summer breeze.8
My fifth point has to do with the structure of the story. The narrative jumps back and forth in time, which is a little unsettling. Despite this, it is not difficult to follow, because dates, locations and important relationships are clearly indicated in the Part and Chapter headings. This being so, I wondered at first why the author would bother to do this with a story which would have been quite compelling anyway if told in a linear fashion.
I could see how revealing bits of the story in the disjointed way that Lara does in her conversations with her London therapist Brendan reflects the way that most people deal with trauma — repressing its effects until either some trigger brings it unbidden to the surface, or one has the rare privilege of feeling safe enough with a friendly listener of proven reliability. However, I needed to get to the end of the book to understand why this approach was especially suitable for this particular story. In one of her later sessions with Brendan, Lara asks, 'why does the past lie in wait for us in the future — why are we its prisoners?'9. Her apparently aggrandising, self-indulgent 'we' is justified when the reader realises that Lara is not the only character carrying trauma. And past trauma not only haunts the present with memories, but may have practical consequences which affect the future not only of the person who experienced it, but also of others whose lives were touched by that person.
2 Ibid pp 199-200
3 Ibid p 202
4 Ibid p 188
5 Ibid p 38
6 Ibid p 87
7 Ibid p 281
8 Ibid p 295
9 Ibid p 321
Marianne Gray reviews The Tin Heart Gold Mine for The South African
The Tin Heart Gold Mine reeks with life in Africa. It is an intriguing novel of skillfully interwoven tales of art, politics, money, love, war and corruption, a vivid tale centred in post-colonial Southern Africa, mainly on one of those small elite expat communities in a far-flung African republic, nominally Chambeshi, Zambia.
The story of Lara, an artist, about art, Africa and what happens when the past unburies itself, The Tin Heart Gold Mine is on the surface a story of an artist in Africa trying to find a personal strategy for fulfilment. On her way, she encounters Tim, an idealistic foreign correspondent, and Oscar an older man with a mysterious past. But deeper than that it is a story of betrayal, hard choices, personal and social violence.
Read More...
The Thrill and the Poetry of The Tin Heart Gold Mine
I read The Tin Heart Gold Mine in one sitting. It was such a rich and complex story that, once in, I knew the only way out lay at the other end! I then needed to sit with the story for a few days, avoiding reading any other novel, while I mulled over what exactly had affected me.
First of all, I loved the descriptions of the African bush, and of the hard work and constant learning that are necessary to survive and succeed there. They fanned into flame my ever-present longing to be back there, under that wide African sky. Because these descriptions are so detailed, they are relatable, certainly to anyone who has lived in, or even just visited, Africa, and probably too to those who have not yet been there. These descriptions work strongly to ground the story in a convincing reality. Yes, it is set in the fictional country of 'Chambeshi', but you can smell the dawn air and feel the sandy soil beneath your feet... you soon replace that name in your own head with a real one that you know!
Read More...
The Thrill and the Poetry of The Tin Heart Gold Mine
I read The Tin Heart Gold Mine in one sitting. It was such a rich and complex story that, once in, I knew the only way out lay at the other end! I then needed to sit with the story for a few days, avoiding reading any other novel, while I mulled over what exactly had affected me.
First of all, I loved the descriptions of the African bush, and of the hard work and constant learning that are necessary to survive and succeed there. They fanned into flame my ever-present longing to be back there, under that wide African sky. Because these descriptions are so detailed, they are relatable, certainly to anyone who has lived in, or even only visited, Africa, and probably too to those who have not yet been there. These contextual pieces work strongly to ground the story in a convincing reality. Yes, it is set in the fictional country of 'Chambeshi', but you can smell the dawn air and feel the sandy soil beneath your feet... you soon replace that name in your own head with a real one that you know!
When they reached the bridge across the great river, the guards were half asleep, warming themselves at a smoky fire by the sentry box. They waved Lara and Jason across, and in those brief moments the river surface was transformed from shadowed grey to opalescent pearl. The first birds began to call and the first water creatures made the river's edges ripple and the reeds stir. They savoured the smell of the river, moist and fresh, the rank stench of decayed plants on its banks, the sweetly powerful and comforting odour of animal dung, the taste of the dry dust of the road rising up in yellow-grey clouds behind them, the clarity of every sound, the increasing sharpness of every sight around and about them. Early morning in the bush was to Lara a song of praise, a precious gift of life. This was a moment of such beauty that no artist could capture it. That it existed at all was sufficient. The two of them, herself and Jason, were the only humans in Eden and it had been made for their delight.1
That romantic text evokes the young Lara's rose-coloured vision of the bush and her new love. Having shared that with her, the reader is bound also to share her discomfort when she discovers that the wild bush is not all dawn and birdsong. It hides some dismaying secrets, such as The Tin Heart Gold Mine that gives its name to the story:
The heat of the African bush is oppressive at midday, but it is green and still without obvious movement. All living creatures hide in the darkest shade they can find. They are followed by flies and biting insects whose incessant hum and buzz quieten as they settle down to feast on animal blood. The mine site, however, was an organised monster of rusted metal rearing its hoists and gears up over the grills and boxes that guarded the pumps and mine shaft. It stood menacingly in the midst of a great open sore of bare and empty earth that ate its way into the surrounding forest. Lara felt it might move, that it was alive with some vile and sinister spite. On the tree line skulked two grim grey shapes made of concrete blocks and roofed with corrugated iron sheets. The heat and devastation of the place, intensified by its burning hot metal structure, made Lara's head ache.2
When Lara then discovers the tin heart itself, for which the mine is named, and the tiny cemetery it guards, her meditation on 'this symbol of undying love that was no longer remembered or seen by anyone'3 opens a window on some of the forgotten history of colonial force, showing in microcosm how World War One scarred not only Europe, but also Africa, and against which Africa fought back by destroying its agents.
Secondly, it was a rare pleasure to find so much knowledgeable discussion of art, artists and the artistic process, layered into the story completely naturally, because the main character, Lara, is an artist. A youthful, just-beginning-to-be successful artist, with just enough sophistication and privilege to be introduced to a wide range of actors in Chambeshi City, but with yet much to learn about life and love, she is in many ways an ideal protagonist for this particular story. I found convincing her emergence into self-knowledge and adulthood; her struggle to define for herself what it means to be an artist and to take responsibility for her choices. There is also a satisfying irony (or... possibly no irony at all, depending on your conclusions at the end of the story) in the placing of this advice to Lara in the mouth of the unfathomable Oscar:
"I'm not being romantic about art and the bohemian lifestyle artists are supposed to want," Oscar said. "The world has a way of not turning out as one expects and there is no morality in the way it works. Of course you need to make a living, but it is not the same thing as making art. I have seen artists whose work was at one time considered subversive and politically dangerous so they were prevented from making art in their own personal way. Those artists couldn't change their way of seeing the world and making art — oh yes, some did give up and try to paint differently, but they were the ones who usually suffered most, because they lost their souls. You mustn't betray yourself, Lara, even if you betray other people."4
Thirdly, another aspect of Lara's character that I found persuasive was her gradually developing awareness that, although the liberal ethos of her elite boarding school in Africa had enabled her to take for granted friendships with people of other races and classes, this was not the same as political awareness, which only began to dawn for her at art school in London.
When she and Liseli were home together for their first English summer vacation in the winter of Chambeshi, Lara started to tell Liseli about her encounters with the class system. There was something in the brightness of Liseli's eye, the way her attention sharpened and a certain irony in her expression that made Lara stop.
"Shit," she said in her newly-acquired art school fashion, "It's always been like that for you, hasn't it?"5
I have some similar background, having been born in Africa, having spent my high school years at a good boarding school in Africa, and having had the privilege of being white and middle class, with more options for self-determination, for international travel, and for extricating myself from politically uncomfortable situations, than most other Africans had at the time. A mistake often made by people who have not shared this experience is to think that the existence of these options means that such a protagonist would not have a story worth telling, or would always choose to escape at the first opportunity, just because they can. As always, humans are more complex than that. The story played out in 'Chambeshi' is a true story of Africa: humans living, growing, choosing, relating, and sometimes dying violently, in a land both rich and harsh, amongst a web of people of different backgrounds and countries, with different agendas and often mixed motivations, including idealism, greed, fear, autonomy and love. Lara may be fictional, but she stands for one of those very real people who have actually lived there.
And then there is the story itself. All my talk of background, art and character might make a potential reader think the whole book either a philosophical treatise or a poetic type of African chick lit. Far from it. Some poignant moments in the story are beautifully evoked, such as when Lara is alone with her child in London after Tim leaves for Africa, and 'the winter darkness leans in and breathes on the windows'6, or when 'she begins to feel that she is floating rootless above her own life.'7 But there is at the heart of the novel a really gripping story, with twists and turns and a build-up of pressure towards the end, made all the more thrilling precisely due to the author's skill in introducing one by one the characters who will be affected, enabling you to care about them to the same extent that Lara does in each case. The actual elements of the story must of course be left undiscussed to avoid spoilers. It's enough to say that love, sex, betrayal, insurgency and revolution touch and, in most cases, permanently change their lives.
And the storytelling is riveting. Lara's two crazy drives for her life are nail-biting. In the first drive, there is a surreal moment as she passes the university while temporarily the unwilling leader of a convoy from Chambeshi airport back to a city rocked by protests that are being violently suppressed by the authorities. The simplicity and terrible beauty of this description lingered with me. I was only able to interpret it some moments after reading it, pretty much as it is implied Lara does, because her main attention is on managing the vehicle to survive the drive:
In their brightly coloured clothes, the boys with clean white shirts, the girls with pretty skirts, they seemed to dance and fall like flowers in a summer breeze.8
My fifth point has to do with the structure of the story. The narrative jumps back and forth in time, which is a little unsettling. Despite this, it is not difficult to follow, because dates, locations and important relationships are clearly indicated in the Part and Chapter headings. This being so, I wondered at first why the author would bother to do this with a story which would have been quite compelling anyway if told in a linear fashion.
I could see how revealing bits of the story in the disjointed way that Lara does in her conversations with her London therapist Brendan reflects the way that most people deal with trauma — repressing its effects until either some trigger brings it unbidden to the surface, or one has the rare privilege of feeling safe enough with a friendly listener of proven reliability. However, I needed to get to the end of the book to understand why this approach was especially suitable for this particular story. In one of her later sessions with Brendan, Lara asks, 'why does the past lie in wait for us in the future — why are we its prisoners?'9. Her apparently aggrandising, self-indulgent 'we' is justified when the reader realises that Lara is not the only character carrying trauma. And past trauma not only haunts the present with memories, but may have practical consequences which affect the future not only of the person who experienced it, but also of others whose lives were touched by that person.
2 Ibid pp 199-200
3 Ibid p 202
4 Ibid p 188
5 Ibid p 38
6 Ibid p 87
7 Ibid p 281
8 Ibid p 295
9 Ibid p 321
The Inspiration Behind Ruth Hartley's New Novel The Tin Heart Gold Mine
Author Ruth Hartley writes a piece for Female First upon the release of her new book The Tin Heart Gold Mine.
There are so many threads woven into The Tin Heart Gold Mine, most from my own life. My novel is set in the very recent past, but one thread began long before I was born. In 1903 an explorer in an unknown and, as yet, uncolonised African country found beautiful green malachite stones on the banks of the Kafue River and made a claim to mine copper ore there. Eighty years later I visited the then-defunct mine. It was close to the Hippo Safari Camp where my husband and I were celebrating our wedding anniversary with friends and champagne. We heard the noise of a small plane overheard. A handsome, rich and charming businessman had flown into the bush camp in an attempt to gatecrash our party.
I knew at once that I had the key to my story. The character Oscar — owner of the mine — now transformed in my head to a gold mine — walked into my imagination and smiled his lopsided grin. ... Read More
The Tin Heart Gold Mine is Exciting and Thoughtful — Five Stars
This is a splendid book set both in a turbulent African country on the verge of a coup and in London’s art-world of the 80s and 90s, as we follow Lara’s tumultuous life from her student years through to the beginnings of maturity as a wife and mother. It is all at once a thriller, a love story and a reflection.
We accompany Lara through a loss of innocence; the vehicles for this are Art, Sex and Africa — I give each of these words a capital letter to bring to them the weight that they carry throughout the book, each is a feature of her deepest way of being. Though there is masses of action and excitement and one gets really hooked in, there is also space given to thought and introspection as Lara tries to work out how she really feels about life as it whirls her round on its carousel. Highly recommended!
5 Comments on “Reviews: The Tin Heart Gold Mine”
The Tin Heart Gold Mine is on the surface a story of an artist in Africa trying to find a personal strategy for fulfilment. On her way she encounters Tim, an idealistic foreign correspondent, and Oscar an older man with a mysterious past. But deeper than that it is a story of betrayal, hard choices, personal and social violence and at the end of the book you are left with doubt – Will Tim come back?, Can Oscar really be dead? and who is the father of Lara’s child? A fascinating read!
Once started The Tin Heart Gold Mine is a book you won’t want to put down. It should come with a warning that any potential reader must be prepared to set aside a day or two to read it without any distractions. This book is wonderfully paced and well plotted. It has it all, a real page-turner.
Charles – thank you for taking the time and trouble to post this review – it means a great deal to me . All writers need this support. Ruth
A perceptive, entertaining and at times, confronting story which kept me going into the small hours. The author captures a chapter in Zambian history and the beauty and danger of the country is undercurrent. We follow the artist Lara as she takes up a commission with the enigmatic Oscar at his Tin Heart safari camp but the story dips and dives into the past as we piece together a larger story through Lara’s varied and unexpected relationships. Lara continually turns to her art as an anchor (for her sense of displacement from Africa when she is in London); to soothe (during her pregnancy she is compelled to render gentle creatures rather than wild beasts in her mural); or to judge character (Oscar’s face). The tin heart is poignantly explained. The ending stayed with me a long time. An absorbing story and recommended reading.
Amanda! Thank you so much for this review of The Tin Heart Gold Mine! It is heartening and encouraging and I am very grateful to you for writing it here on my comments page. You have done an excellent summation of the book. So happy that you liked it!