- This reader’s impression was written and sent to LitNet on the writer's own initiative.
Hell of a country by David Cornwell was one of the outstanding reads of 2025.
Almost a decade before, Cornwell announced himself in a big way with a seemingly small and intimate exploration of life on the fringes, entitled Like it matters. Well, turns out it did matter – Ed and Charlotte’s tale of love, loss, plotting and perdition revealed just how much it matters to screenwriter and musician Cornwell to get his textures, ambience and vernacular of emotional violence just right. His debut managed to scrounge around, cut to the quick, and lay bare what it means to hit rock bottom, with an often astonishing, stripped-bare style. This in a carefully rendered, even explosively purgatorial Muizenberg in the Cape.
A simple love story and a chronicle of addictions and eventual survival, this was not: Cornwell’s refusal to seek out simple solutions or turn towards proselytising meant that his marriage of form and content had profound things to say about alienation and lives bitterly losing their shape. Fascinating forms of plot loss abound there, if you will.
When I heard that Cornwell had turned a sensational murder case from the seventies into a “creative reimagining” – that is to say, a true-crime novel (with all that this entails and presupposes) – I was more than a little curious, even excited. In Cornwell’s hands, the real "scissors murder" case from 1974 involving Marlene Lindberg, her lover Christian Funinda and an amputee named Martinez Cuckoo, retains the basic premise, with new names and the inevitable employ of creative licence. In Hell of a country, the outline follows Lorraine van Niekerk, who is obsessed with her boss, André Bekker. When he refuses to leave his wife Sunette, Lorraine enlists the help of an amputee, Alfie Geemooi, to murder the wife.
You’ll never see me offering spoilers, and where the plot is concerned I’m not saying another word. Suffice to say that Cornwell has delivered, and then some, on the rich promise of his debut. The almost ten years that have passed since his first book have resulted in an approach and style that are tremendously focused, laser-sharp and spare. They have also produced a prose form and register that are in turn lyrical, richly suggestive, playful, muscular and spiky – regularly surprising in a single paragraph as the language moves from spare and serpentine to lushly expansive, all while never losing the reader for a second. Some feat.
Don’t expect even a sliver of sensationalist true crime, well-worn clichés that aren’t turned inside out, or gratuitous violence for its own sake. This is resolutely no pornographic exhibition of suffering, and the scheming that does happen is in keeping with the nature and motivation of the characters involved.
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Don’t expect even a sliver of sensationalist true crime, well-worn clichés that aren’t turned inside out, or gratuitous violence for its own sake. This is resolutely no pornographic exhibition of suffering, and the scheming that does happen is in keeping with the nature and motivation of the characters involved.
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It is tempting to home in on the author’s expert characterisation of truly unsympathetic subjects – Alfie Geemooi, so appropriately named, is arguably the exception here and could be viewed as a victim in many ways. But it will have to suffice to say that Cornwell renders his characters psychologically rounded, traumatised and fully at the mercy of their relationships, family dynamics, power struggles and choices, whether good or bad.
You’ll be gripped, entertained and undoubtedly horrified by the things 18-year-old Lorraine van Niekerk, her much older boss and lover André Bekker and his wife Sunette get up to. Lorraine’s inner landscape, especially, is thoroughly tormented and twisted, and her Cape Town is one of devils, demons and a deep, blue sea.
For a novel this tight – a little over 200 pages, typeset for maximum readability – you rarely get the feeling that Cornwell is in a rush. He knows exactly when to abandon any impressions of the florid and languid and go for the proverbial kill, though. It’s also, as expected, a mordantly and sardonically funny novel, piercingly hilarious in places.
Eleven out of ten for Cornwell’s meticulous and multivalent rendering of seventies Cape Town, paired with his insights into the drivers of sexuality, lust, greed, envy, alienation, loss and resentment. You can tell that musician and screenwriter Cornwell has listened to more than just his fair share of Nick Cave and Tom Waits, and gorged on the books of Denis Johnson. There’s an aching, lingering, endlessly affecting reckoning with wounding and loss, emasculation and disempowerment, at play here. Some nightmares are self-forged; others you just can’t escape or run away or wake up from. Sometimes that nightmare has become your life.
Cornwell shows just how powerful political and social forces are in the ways that they determine opportunity and lack, and how close to the surface hate and scouring violence can be. Who your parents were and what they did for a living, where you were born, where you went to school or didn’t go to school, what your social circle looked like and who you were fortunate or unfortunate enough to look up to – these things all mattered then in South Africa, and they certainly still do.
Speaking of, Hell of a country not only has a whole lot to say about the different kinds of violence perpetrated in this particular case, but tellingly reveals the psychic and social violence and amputative pain visited on those less privileged, often going unseen. Pathos by the bucketloads. Again, while the various subnarratives and love triangle machinations on offer here are deeply compelling and equally disturbing, it is the creative imagining of the story of amputee and social misfit Alfie Geemooi that truly gets under your skin. How different things could have been!
Power, obsession, desire and vulnerability intersect and bleed out in ways that make your skin crawl, but Cornwell is no one-trick pony. He never inserts himself or his own authorial voice into the narrative in an undermining or grotesquely didactic way, choosing rather to observe and colour in with reverse-prophetic precision.
Faulkner had a point: The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past. Cornwell knows this and takes it to heart. His pen is the scalpel, painstakingly yet unobtrusively making incisions, teasing out connections and engaging the reader, you and me, without making a bloody mess. There is a subtle, moving, exceptional tenderness eventually, when things inevitably go spectacularly awry.
The final passages of Hell of a country, then, offer a masterclass in viscerally concentrated insight into a truly hellish place.
How did we get here? Where did we come from? And where are we going? A place so hard that it glitters like the brightest, clearest diamonds and cuts like the sharpest pair of scissors.
Uncompromising. Unforgettable. A major contender for the 2026 awards season.
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