Karen Jennings’ emotionally rich tale of emancipation

The South African author Karen Jennings gained attention in 2021 when her novel An Island was longlisted for the Booker prize. That book – set against the backdrop of an unnamed African country where colonisers are defeated by a strongman saviour who turns out to be worse – was good, but it was nothing on Jennings’s next novel, Crooked Seeds (2024), longlisted for the Women’s prize, which gave us a world-class antiheroine.

These were not consoling books but they were brilliant in their sharp insights. And if Crooked Seeds employed a stark beauty to describe modern South Africa – reminiscent of that of Damon Galgut – then Jennings’s new novel, First of December, is a departure in two directions.

First, it has a historical setting: it takes place in the week before 1 December 1838, when slaves in the Cape Colony (what is now South Africa) were fully emancipated. Slavery had been abolished four years earlier, but those who were enslaved had to continue to work as often unpaid “apprentices” until 1838 in order to be “trained for freedom”.

Second, its narrative is largely internal, with the reader held tight in the rolling thoughts of the three central characters: James Kendrick, an Englishman abroad in the Cape Colony; his wife, Caroline; and a soon-released enslaved woman, who – aptly for her social standing – is given no name.

What hasn’t changed from the previous books is that Jennings’s characters remain complex and embattled – their greatest conflicts being with themselves – and as a result they feel real. There is no settling-in period for them: the novel has the pleasing sense of Jennings having ripped out any establishing introductions and thrown us directly into her characters’ turmoil.

James is a businessman, or fancies himself as one, but his plots falter. He failed in America, and had to depend on the kindness of others. “Let that be a lesson to you, they’d said, let that be your comeuppance and serve to bring about a change in you. Yet he had not changed.”

Now James sees his fortune in the Cape, reckoning that the recently emancipated population, when they become paid workers, will have money to spend. But as the story opens, he’s stunned by another overturning of luck, as a ship he chartered runs aground, and he watches helplessly as locals scavenge the shore for his shipwrecked goods.

Caroline, dragged here by James, resents the “multitude of foreigners who seemed to have been spat out here at the bottom of the globe”, without seeing herself as one of them. She longs for home, but gets no succour from relatives there. Her sister sends resentful letters: “Are we to expect, should you ever return, that you have been transformed into a native, with clothes of fur and garbled speech?” And she is sick, losing weight, while James vacillates between wanting the old Caroline back (“that laughter, that colour, that love”) and seeking access to her family wealth to pursue his plans.

The third voice is of the formerly enslaved woman, beginning to test her liberty, “touching the world and wanting to be a part of it”. But her sections are the thinnest parts of the book; she exists mainly in contrast to James and Caroline, whose imprisonment within their own personalities hardens while she grows freer.

Nonetheless, First of December offers an emotionally rich reading experience. As Caroline and James fail in communication with each other, Jennings presents their teeming thoughts and uncertainties in a way that keeps us on our toes, the restricted plot supplanted with emotional crashes and switchbacks. It is less pacy than her previous novels, but deeper and more generous in scope to its characters – however ungenerous they are to one another.

First of December by Karen Jennings is published by Holland House (£10.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £9.89. (10% off RRP). Delivery charges may apply

Photography by De Agostini/Getty Images