ROY CAMPBELL’S CHILDREN’S NOVEL, THE MAMBA’S PRECIPICE
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25159/0027-2639/895Keywords:
Roy Campbell, South African children’s fiction, Laurens van der PostAbstract
Roy Campbell’s The mamba’s precipice (1953), a novel for children, is his only prose work of fiction. This article examines three aspects of the book, namely its autobigraphical elements; its echoes of Campbell’s friendship with the writers Laurie Lee and Laurens van der Post; and its parallels with other English children’s literature. Campbell based the story on the holidays his family spent on the then Natal South Coast, and he writes evocative descriptions of the sea and the bush. The accounts of feats achieved by the boy protagonist recall Campbell’s self-mythologising memoirs. There are similarities and differences between The mamba’s precipice and the way Van der Post wrote about Natal in The hunter and the whale (1967). Campbell’s novel in some respects resembles nineteenth-century children’s adventure stories set in South Africa, and it also has elements of the humour typical of school stories of the ‘Billy Bunter’ era and the cosy, mundane activities and dialogue common to other mid-century South African and English children’s books.
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Accepted 2016-04-18
Published 2016-10-26
