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Agaat tells the story of the complex dynamics of a small South African farming family, Milla, who inherits a family farm, her husband Jak, Agaat, the neglected and abused young daughter of one of her mother's farmhands, who Milla adopts, and Milla's son Jakkie.

Milla is lying paralysed and dying of motor neurone disease, able only to blink her eyes but fully lucid, while Agaat cares for her, and the story is told through her thoughts, flashbacks and diary entries.

The novel packs in several different themes:

- complex inter-family and master-servant relationships. Milla is unsparing on even herself in her recollections, recalling her husband's complaint

"But do you know Milla, what it's like to spend your days next to a woman who always knows better. In whose eyes you can't do anything right? For whom everything you tackle is doomed in advance"

- indirect but very telling observations on the apartheid regime, as Milla brings up the coloured child Agaat and encounters prejudice from family, neighbours, the establishment and even the farmhands. Even Milla's own motivations are suspect - she seems to treat Agaat more as a trained animal performing tricks than a pari passu family member, and once she has a biological son Agaat is soon relegated albeit to a still relatively priviliged housekeeper role.

- a deliberately painfully detailed and claustrophic description of Milla's last days. Neatly the story offers parallels between Agaat caring for the helpless Milla and Milla's drawout attempts to communicate through Milla's eye contacts and blinking, with Milla's own initial caring for the mute and feral Agaat when she is first adopted. Indeed Agaat appears to quite deliberately be mirroring her treatment as a child as Milla regresses to childhood helplessness.

- and a warts and all heavily researched and detailed, indeed perhaps overly detailed, description of farming life.

The overall effect is that the novel is an impressive achievement, but the net effect is a rather sprawling read of almost 700 pages. I have no objection to long books, quite the contrary if the story or quality of prose justifies it, but here one felt van Niekerk has tried to pack too many things in, and failed to come up with a more compact way of covering the different themes.

Which, of course, only increases my admiration for the translator, Michiel Heyns.