Kings of the Water is the third novel from writer Mark Behr

Mark Behr

Mark Behr is a Tanzanian writer in South Africa. He is currently professor of Creative Writing at Rhodes College, Memphis, TN. He has been professor of World Literature and Fiction Writing at the College of Santa Fe in Santa Fe, New Mexico...

, published in November 2009.

Plot summary

It is the story of thirty-five-year-old Michiel (Michael) Steyn who returns to the family farm in South Africa for his mother's funeral. This is Steyn's first return to South Africa in fifteen years after leaving in 1987 to escape from a scandal he was involved in while he was an officer in the South African navy. Steyn is from both Afrikaans and English extraction and is now a US citizen. He lives with his partner Kamil Cassis (who is half Palestinian, half Jewish) on the boundary of San Francisco's Castro district. The book engages specifically South African questions of racism, guilt, responsibility and the tentativeness of forgiveness but the novel's ending asks for an international reading, in particular through its foreshadowing of US foreign and domestic policy in the era of George W Bush. Kings of the Water also offers a glimpse at an older version of a marginal character from Embrace

Embrace (novel)

Embrace is a 2001 novel by South African author Mark Behr.Embrace is the story of the sexual awakening of Karl De Man, a 13-year-old pupil at the Berg, an exclusive boys' school in South Africa in the 1970s...

 as well as allusion to the extended fishing scene from The Smell of Apples

The Smell of Apples

The Smell of Apples is a 1995 debut novel by South African Mark Behr, also published in the same year in Afrikaans as Die Reuk van Appels....

, in this way seeming to insist that all three these novels be read and understood in relation to one another.

Criticism

Kate Saunders in The Times of London (November 2009) reviewed it as follows: "Superbly written, thoughtful and unflinching, this terrific novel explores the mentality of the Afrikaner male — with wonderfully poetic use of the Afrikaans language." Novelist Christopher Hope, reviewing for The Guardian (January 2010), noted that the book shared the spirit of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and called the novel "one of the most moving to come out of South Africa in many years." Shortly after publication Kings of the Water was shortlisted for The Commonwealth Book Award, Africa Region.