Of the many different emotions a novel can inspire in its readers, anger is rarely one of them, but I’d challenge anyone to come away from You Will Be Safe Here in a state of calm. It tells a story so powerful and upsetting that it’s a useful reminder of how fiction can illuminate the indignities visited upon those the world has mistreated and then forgotten ... Where many novels run out of steam as they approach the end, You Will Be Safe Here grows more engaging with each chapter ... This is a penetrating study of politics and history, but it’s also about cruelty, selfishness and destiny ... You Will Be Safe Here is a very fine novel ... It’s the work of someone who understands his subject and employs calm, efficient prose to leave the reader feeling stunned by the cruelty and barbarism human beings routinely show each other.
...a polished and harrowing debut novel ... These distinct narratives are equally convincing. Both have been extensively researched....yet that learning is worn lightly, and Barr shifts between two very different tones with a light touch, maintaining a subtle emotional intelligence throughout. There are moments of almost shocking drollery, too...Meanwhile, the harsh poetry of the land anchors the text, its red earth stretching out beneath starlit stillness, unchanging from generation to generation ... Homophobic violence overshadows the brutal closing section of You Will Be Safe Here but it’s the connections between then and now that make it so devastating ... By its end, so many instinctive responses will have been upturned that the reader will be left with just two certainties: that the circularity of man’s cruelty to his fellow human beings is endless, and that only kindness is stronger.
The twin narratives stand side by side as almost independent novels, though the connection between them has been subtly engineered. ... It’s quite a leap from North Lanarkshire to South Africa in the early 20th century; but in a continuation of the style developed through his memoir, Barr’s first novel is distinguished by its compassion, its wisdom and its remarkable sense of poetry.
This theme of safety runs throughout the novel, which is divided into three parts of nearly equal length ... Barr’s structural choices are effective, if heavy-handed ... [Part Three] seems jam-packed to the point of overflowing. This is potent, gripping material. No doubt readers will want more of it. What keeps them turning the page, even as the novel lurches back and forth in time, is Barr’s use of diction and point of view. His sentences are nimble and adaptive ... Barr’s facility with language is on display here, and many readers will happily lose themselves in his supple prose.
Barr unearths this period in South African history in part to explore how the brutal legacy of colonialism—first by Boer settlers, then by the British—sowed the seeds of racial division that plague the country today ... His history lessons are instructive and carefully researched ... Balancing the terrors...Barr offers moments of intimacy and tenderness ... While mostly adept at bridging these distant time periods, alternating the two narratives, rather than presenting the stories in strict side-by-side chronology, might have increased tension and deepened thematic resonance. The greatest disappointment lies in how the novel mostly evades the stories of Black and mixed-race South Africans ... Which is a shame, for Barr’s writing is strong, and his gifts for evoking the nuances of complex political history are elsewhere superb.
At times, the connections between the two stories seem tenuous, but Barr’s promising debut is an unblinking look at the terrors humankind can perpetrate to squash the 'other.' As hard-hitting as the acts of violence are, more insidious is the evil that seeps into the system that aids and abets atrocities.
