Playing With Fire is Henning Mankell's second novel about Sofia, a friend of his, who lost her legs when she trod on a mine at the age of ten. Sofia takes in sewing, to augment the income her mother gets from selling the vegetables she grows on the village fields. But Sofia also desires a life of her own: her own man, her own career, and her own future. Her experiences in hospital have opened her eyes to the benefits modern life could offer the rural areas. She is determined to become a doctor, to help in the battle against diseases such as AIDS, which ravages Africa, and which, she fears, is about to claim her sister, Rosa. She realizes that ignorance is the cause of much of her country's problems. Despite her youth, through her experiences Sofia has learnt enough about life to develop her determination actively to help her country. When she meets a new boy, who disappears as mysteriously as he arrived, she dreams about love, a love on a very diffrent level to Rosa's quick flings behind the village shop.

Mankell, a Swede, worked for many years in Africa, and writes with authority on modern life in the southern part of the continent. Authenticity pervades his writing, the narrative encapsulating the much slower pace of life, the totally different experiences of a teenager growing up in a remote village in Mozambique compared with an adolescent in the developed world. He writes with considerable dignity and economy; there is no trace of voyeuristic sympathy nor are there any judgemental overtones. He writes it as it is, with admirable simplicity and a shining sense of poetic reality. Sofia, although she lives in a world unimaginable to the majority of young readers, has hopes, dreams and fears like any other teenager. This is a fascinatingly original book, which is a revelation in so many ways: reading it encourages us to question so much of what we, in the developed world, consider essential. As a school resource.

 Playing with Fire has endless possibilities not only for considering conditions, expectations and attitudes in the developing world and the threat of endemic disease, but also the empathy with which Mankell treats his subject, and the way in which, through the pace and poetic phrasing of his style, he draws the reader into the African mindset.

2007-12-31