D.G.G. Berry's the Great North Road

D.G.G. Berry's The Great North Road, John Eppel's first novel, is an immensely funny satire of a white working class community, stretching in time from the late-1950s Matabeleland, Southern Rhodesia, to the early-1980s Zimbabwe. It is a story of people, in the main, who cannot be relied upon. When Rose Hadi is run over on the Great North Road, something much more than a 12 year old girl begins to decompose. Behind the masks of chauvinism and fundamentalism, persists a zany, larger-than-life world of haemorrhoids, milk stouts, tokoloshes, and powder-blue safari suits through which Duiker Berry, Eppel's nostalgia-ridden 'hero', wanders. At least, ostensibly, that's the story. And, come to think of it, is it even Eppel's novel? And, who exactly can the reader trust?