Viewing/Reading rec (with more personal history for your, um, enjoyment 😉):
When AcornTV announced back in 2022 that they would be streaming — and, indeed, had had a hand in producing — a mystery series set in contemporary South Africa, I was intrigued. That series, Recipes for Love and Murder, proved very enjoyable. It accomplished something that it had never occurred to me could be accomplished: it made me think that South Africa might possibly be an interesting place to visit.
The show is based on a novel of the same title, the first in a series by Sally Andrew. I’ve just finished reading it, and it, too, is excellent, but wow — a lot was changed for television!
In both contexts, our protagonist, Maria, is the middle-aged widow of an abusive husband, lives on a small farm outside a small town in the arid Klein Karoo region (in the book, Ladismith, a real place; on TV the name has been changed to Eden, but apparently they do film it in Ladismith), and has a part-time job at the Karoo Gazette writing a recipe column under the byline Tannie (“Aunt”) Maria. The paper is in financial trouble, and the syndicate that owns it tells the editor that they need an advice column to increase sales. The only way to do this without adding pages, which they can’t afford to do, is to eliminate the recipe column. This could put Maria out of a job, but she agrees to become the agony aunt, while sneaking a recipe into each of her replies! The plot is set in motion when one of her first correspondents, a woman in an abusive marriage, writes back to say that she is making a plan to leave her husband and is murdered soon after.
That’s where the novel and the show begin to diverge. In the novel, she’s Maria van Haarten and is more or less a local. In the show, she’s Maria Purvis; she was born in South Africa, but was sent to Scotland at an early age, along with her mother, when her father’s political activities begin to make life difficult for the family; she then returned to South Africa and the farm she inherited after her mother’s death, which occurred six weeks before her husband died of a heart attack. (All of this has become crucial in the show’s second series, which is being dropped as I write this. I haven’t yet read the second novel, and have decided not to do so until series two has finished dropping, so I won’t know for a while how it differs from the original.)
But the changes go a lot further than that. Maria narrates the book, but there are plenty of scenes in the show in which she doesn’t appear. Just about every character’s surname has been changed. The police detective who investigates the murder and grows close to Maria (although this seems to be cooling down in series two) has had not only his first and last names changed, but his entire background as well, in ways that strike me as raising the ante for them as a (potential) couple. Characters and relationships that are tangential in the novel are fleshed out considerably, and a few entirely new ones have been added. There’s a bit more political context in the novel, which was published in 2015 and is explicitly set in November and December of 2013 (high summer, and there are vivid descriptions of withering heat). It’s all good, and I recommend both the novel and the show, but I’m curious about the thinking behind the changes.
Incidentally, the book includes a recipe section and a fairly thorough glossary; there’s a lot of Afrikaans vocabulary. I should add that I enjoyed the series in spite of occasionally being unable to follow the dialogue, which is basically in English but is occasionally subtitled. This isn’t the South African accent that I grew accustomed to hearing in my youth.
Oh? You became accustomed to a South African accent, PD? And how did that happen?
South Africa was in the back of my mind from an early age. In about 1970 my friends and I were told that we could no longer have a type of tart green apple from South Africa that had become a popular snack (often preceded by a chocolate chip cookie); they were picked by slaves, our parents told us. This was technically untrue, as slavery was abolished there in 1834, but for many of us it was the first indication that very bad things were happening in the world.
I don’t know who brought this to the attention of our parents, but during the 1960s and 70s, my neighborhood was a favored destination for white South African political exiles. Many of them were attached to the University of Chicago, with the result that their children became my schoolmates. I went (walked) out with a son of one of those families for a while. Another included the surgeon who operated on my father when he was first diagnosed with cancer — this while I was working in an office alongside the surgeon’s wife. They were city people, and were uniformly “English” (that is, English-speaking).
For the record, they were by and large Jewish: mostly nominally — unconcealed and unapologetic Soviet sympathies don’t go well with a religiously observant way of life — but another of my old schoolmates from that cohort is now a Conservative (Masorti) rabbi. (The current Jewish situation in South Africa doesn’t seem to be very good.)
