The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah: book review

The Last Brother (2010) is set on the island of Mauritius in 2005 but remembering 1945 sixty years later. The narrator, Raj, is seventy years old, and haunted by the events he witnessed at the age of ten.

Raj has two brothers – he is the middle brother. Anil was older and Vinod was the youngest. “As a child I was a weakling … the most fearful brother.” But that is not where the story begins. It begins with David: “I saw David again yesterday.”

He is thinking of David Stein, a boy befriended in 1945, the year of the catastrophic cyclone that ravaged part of the island and changed his life forever. Raj is at his grave in the cemetery of Saint-Martin. He remembers the first time he saw David. He was hidden in a bush, watching his father’s workplace. His brutal alcoholic father worked as a warden at the State Prison of Beau-Bassin. From his hiding place, he expected to see dangerous men, runaways, robbers, and bad men: “I was expecting to see cages, fences, padlocks and policemen … I also formed a clear picture of my father in his uniform at the centre of all this, with all these people going in fear of him, as my mother and I dreaded him when he came home drunk in the evening and his hand came hammering down beside us, upon us, upon my mother, upon me.”

But he saw no such thing, just a “tranquil splendour” of bushes with wildflowers, lush green grass and pots with gardenias, marguerite daisies and roses.” Then he saw them: “all white people … I had never seen white people so thin and weary … I thought white people were bosses at the factory, drove about in cars and flew aircraft, I should never have believed they could be locked up.” Then he sees a boy, his age, walk towards the barbed wire, facing him. He saw “the tiny face of a blond child lost amid the humid heat.” Who was he and who were the white people in prison?

Raj’s friendship with David – this orphan from Prague - is brief, but intense. Appanah’s writing shows the brutality of home and the tenderness of a boy’s love, the naiveté and the innocence of the time. The author reveals the historical significance of 1945 slowly until the reader comes to know who David is and why he is a young boy in prison.

The novel is not only of a close friendship, like brothers – like with his own brothers - but  of a man’s memories of his own family – his wife, son, and grandchild – his submissive relationship with his violent father, and the mutually protective relationship with his mother. It is also about the decisions a child makes: impulsive, emotional, long-lasting.