[N]ew ages have come and gone, and things have seldom worked out quite as hoped. South Africa is no exception, as André Brink makes clear in his new novel The Rights of Desire. The title is a quotation from Brink's eminent contemporary and compatriot J. M. Coetzee ("I make my case on the rights of desire…. On the god who makes even the small birds quiver"), and on one level the novel is all about the "rights" of desire, the desire that not only makes us quiver in its clutches but can enslave us at any age.

Sixty-five-year-old Cape Town widower and former university librarian Ruben Olivier, the narrator, falls madly in love with his 29-year-old lodger, Tessa Butler, who leads him on a not-so-merry dance, while asserting the rights of her own desire with half the eligible men in Cape Town. So far, so predictable, in the manner, say, of an early Kingsley Amis farce. But deeper currents are aflow.