BOOKS: Casualties of Truth, by Lauren Francis-Sharma
A literary fiction thriller which poses puzzles of morality delivered compellingly
CASUALTIES OF TRUTH, by Lauren Francis-Sharma, 272 Pages, GroveAlantic/Atlantic Monthly Press, February 2025
[Please be advised, I’m not a book critic or reviewer. I’m a passionate reader who has endless respect for writers, and who shares my thoughts when I’m deeply moved by a book, when I want to influence others to read it. I don’t claim any expertise, only a deep love of wonderful books. You’ve been warned.]
Casualty: Something lost, stolen, damaged, or destroyed. 1
Truth: The body of real things, events, and facts: ACTUALITY and/or a transcendent fundamental or spiritual reality.2
When I read a novel in which the limning of an individual’s experience so captures the vicissitudes of the zeitgeist, I’m given to wonder whether the author knew when they began the project that this was the goal, where it was going. Did Lauren Francis-Sharma know when she began CASUALTIES OF TRUTH that its publication date would come in the month following the inauguration of a president who has committed and abetted and facilitated and encouraged countless atrocities, assaults, abrogations, and shameless malefactions against decency, morality, and humanity, and yet never suffered the consequences of his actions, but, rather, continued to accrete power and riches and influence; that the world would be descending into rotting decomposition, witnessing genocide committed by bullying countries on weaker states, experience class and gender and religious and ethnic variances demonized and zealously targeted for destruction as the world seemingly hurtles toward Armageddon?
CASUALTIES OF TRUTH is not an easy novel. But it is an essential one. It poses moral questions and conundrums with which all thinking, feeling citizens of the world are either already grappling or soon will be.
Prudence Wright, protagonist of the novel, spent a few months in South Africa in 1996 as an intern at a Johannesburg law firm, during which time she attended sessions held by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the purpose of which was to expose the human rights atrocities and crimes carried out from 1960 to 1994. Meant to heal through transparency, accountability, and trust-building therefrom, the committee had the power to grant amnesty to the perpetrators but not the power to implement reparations to the victims and survivors. 21,000 victims were heard, about 2000 of them in public hearings. Out of the approximately 7200 applications for amnesty made, 849 were granted.
Which, in my opinion, was probably 849 too many. As with the Nuremburg defendants, some of the appellants argued that they were following orders from the state and thus should not be held liable for their actions. The appellants contention was that mens rea was not present since they believed — or were led to believe — that they were at war. However, torture, deliberate attacks on civilians, and other abhorrent crimes against humanity are not excused even in wartime.
Prudence meets Matshediso during the sessions and their paths cross, their fates intertwine in ferociously unfortunate and frightening ways.
Decades later, Prudence, having put on the back burner a successful career as a global management consultant in order to care for her son who is on the spectrum, is out to a business dinner near her home in Washington, D.C. with her husband, Davis, to meet the new IT whiz he’s recruited for his employer, and that recruit turns out to be Matshediso.
Neither Prudence for Matshediso reveal their connection to one another, and it is in pieces and thriller-episodic fashion made clear whether he sought Prudence out, what his agenda is, and how the two were involved in the past. There is a cat and mouse element to the narrative, driving it, but its real force and impact is in the complicated, morally and ethically complex questions surrounding the actions taken by people whose spirits and lives are ground to bits, made inconsequential by power structures, governments, and martial constructs, in answer to which they’ve seemingly no recourse, where there is no possibility of institutional justice.
When — if ever — is vigilantism justified? Are the people doing the bidding of tyrants as guilty of wrongdoing as the tyrants? When irreparable, unimaginably evil harm has been done to someone, does it become an eye for an eye should they come in contact with those who committed the sins against them?
Neither Prudence nor Matshediso seem at first to be characters the reader will want to embrace. They are prickly, and at times not terribly self-aware, also self-righteous, but there are reasons, there is history which paved those paths to protective, distancing traits.
The narrative jumps between Johannesburg 1996 and Washington, D.C. 2018 during the first two thirds or so and then remains in 2018 as it hurtles to its disturbing, upsetting, terrifying conclusion.
In a novel that invites — demands, even — examination of the costs of oppression, class-ism, white-supremacy, misogyny, and how the currency of unfettered power unleashes the worst impulses of humanity, as well as the line between justice and vengeance, a novel in which decency and empathy are erased in the desire for retribution and retaliation, it is somehow made all the more powerful that such potential ugliness is laid out in such splendidly constructed prose, resplendent with insight, wisdom, and intensely, deeply human, emotional prosody.
I was moved again and again by paragraphs like this:
There were people from one’s past who were present at the worst time in one’s life, people whose very name evoked a time and a place one didn’t want to revisit. Those were people you never wanted to see or hear from again. They were casualties of memory, casualties of too-hard truths.
That’s some awfully glorious writing, isn’t it? Again, something so hard, an emotion so gutting, writ in such rhythmic sentences.
There are myriad such sentences and paragraphs contained in this novel, along with enough fodder for thought and book club discussions to keep you awake for weeks on end. This is one of those books I will always remember vividly when I hear its title.
Please read it. I finished it in one day. It is difficult to put down. And now. off to find what to read next, so, here I am, going.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary, online
ibid. footnote 1