This is a slow but brilliant exploration of the time prior to WWII. The alternate timeline predates WWI but is not free from war as parts of South Africa fight for their independence from England. Thought provoking from start to finish, questions of equality and the price of freedom as well as the loyalty of family strike deep. Wonderful book where the lands of South Africa are practically a character of their own.

Seth Fleisher’s “The Farther Shore” is historical fiction at its finest: a richly imagined novel that brings obscure people and events to life while using them to explore larger questions of memory, inheritance, racism, and familial love. Its greatest achievement is the complicated portrait it offers of a father and son whose lives are separated by both geography and decades yet remain deeply intertwined.

Fleisher tells his story through two timelines. The first, set around the turn of the twentieth century, follows Eugene Marais after the death of his young wife from a completely preventable complication of childbirth. Their son, Charles, survives that birth, but the tragedy profoundly shapes the lives of both men. Eugene is an intellectually restless autodidact and experimentalist who investigates human evolution through studies of primates and insects. He is also a lifelong morphine addict and a passionate South African nationalist who becomes involved in the Afrikaner struggle against British colonial rule. Charles, by contrast, is a formally educated scholar of Buddhism and a member of the Harvard faculty. Estranged from his father for most of his life, he carries a deep sense of confusion and abandonment stemming from his mother’s death and Eugene’s subsequent absence.

The two narratives gradually converge in fascinating ways. Charles discovers that an antisemitic movement at Harvard has appropriated and distorted his father’s unpublished ideas about human evolution in order to support theories of racial superiority. This thread provides a particularly disturbing glimpse into the extent to which Nazi racial thinking found sympathetic or accommodating audiences in American academic circles before World War II. Fleisher makes a similar historical connection through Eugene’s story, depicting the harsh and often abusive treatment of Afrikaners by the British during the Boer War. The novel’s exploration of an already active antisemitic movement in prewar South Africa is equally revealing, particularly in retrospect, given the racial ideology that would later become institutionalized under apartheid.

What makes the novel more than an absorbing historical narrative, however, is Fleisher’s treatment of Eugene and Charles themselves. Neither man is reduced to a simple hero or villain. Eugene’s intellectual curiosity and commitment to his homeland coexist uneasily with addiction, emotional failings, and the damage he inflicts on his son. Charles’s scholarly sophistication does not free him from the wounds of his childhood. Their relationship becomes a meditation on how the failures of one generation can be inherited by the next, and on how difficult it can be to understand the people who have shaped us.

The novel is not without weaknesses, however. While Eugene and Charles are compellingly drawn, many of the secondary characters receive considerably less development. Charles’s romantic involvement with a Jewish student and his eventual connection with one of Eugene’s former research assistants sometimes feel more like mechanisms for advancing the plot than organic developments. Fleisher also relies rather heavily on coincidence to bring his two narratives together. Some of these connections stretch the bounds of plausibility and occasionally make an otherwise carefully constructed historical novel feel overly engineered.

Nevertheless, these shortcomings do little to diminish my enthusiasm for the novel. Fleisher has taken little-known historical figures and disturbing episodes from South African and American history and woven them into an engrossing story about family, ideology, racial prejudice, and the burdens of the past. “The Farther Shore” demonstrates how historical fiction can illuminate not only forgotten history but also the complicated ways in which ideas, prejudices, and unresolved family wounds pass from one generation to another.

“The Farther Shore” be Seth Fleisher is a complex and fascinating exploration of science, religion, race, colonialism, and the impact of our beliefs. It is based on the life of Eugene Marais. Sweeping in its coverage, the book takes the reader on a journey across the world as we follow Eugene Marais and his son Charles. Eugene is a truly brilliant man, whose mind winds itself around complex issues, ceaseless in his quest for scientific answers to the links between human memory and suffering. He is also deeply wounded and an addict. His son, Charles Marais, studies ancient languages to access the words of the Buddha, also seeking an answer to the problem of human suffering. We see a family in all its beauty and all its pain. We also see South Africa between the two world wars. Fleisher allows us to experience a family and their country, separated but inseparable. This book is as complex and interwoven as a weaver’s nest. The events mirror the central questions raised by the novel. This is a beautifully written work, and I recommend reading it when you have time to consider the ideas and relationships within its pages. The more I think about “The Farther Shore”, the more I recognize its depth. It is a book that invites examination and thought. “Thus have I heard….”

Thank you to NetGalley and Green City Books for Access to this ARC. This is my honest review.

“The Farther Shore” is a remarkable first novel from a fantastic new voice in historical fiction, Seth Fleisher. I was so intrigued by the book’s premise that I inadvertently received advanced reader’s copies from both NetGalley and BookSirens, courtesy of Mr. Fleisher and publisher Green City Books. NetGalley pitches it as to be appealing to readers of Anthony Doerr's “All the Light We Cannot See,” with which I was captivated, and Ruth Ozeki's “A Tale for the Time Being,” a fascinating tale, and Abraham Verghese's “Cutting for Stone,” one of my favorite books of all time. How could I then NOT want to read this book? Although the book is a trifle long and not the most gripping of stories, I found “The Farther Shore” fascinating and interesting to read, and I learned a lot of pre-world war two and South African history with which I previously was unaware. My review is of this book is voluntary.

I enjoyed Mr. Fleisher’s duel time line approach in writing this story, alternating between the turn of the 20th century in South Africa and the Boer Wars with the British and the 1930s at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the Nazis in Germany began their efforts to eradicate the Jewish population. There’s a remarkable and uncanny parallel between England’s efforts to eradicate the Boers in South Africa, through starvation and neglect in concentration camps, to the Nazis efforts during WWII to eradicate those they found undesirable. Similarly, the Nazis’ justification for extermination of the “lower races” is eerily similar to the justification for Apartheid in South Africa, as it has been for the subjugation and segregation of races here in the US. It’s obviously not a coincidence that the subject of racism and antisemitism features prominently in “The Farther Shore” as in several other recent releases, as both are increasingly prevalent today here in the US and abroad. People are supposed to learn from history.

The book is emotionally complex, dealing with feelings of loss, abandonment, betrayal, guilt, love, anger, and the consequences of memory. It’s replete with historic, factual information. Many of the characters and events are real; however, the plot line connecting the two main characters, father and son, is entirely fictional. I enjoyed reading this book and look forward to sharing it and discussing it with my book club and other members in my community. I recommend that everyone read this intelligent, thoughtful novel.