The Dark Tower
Zulu War novel — Isandhlwana.
Christina Koning’s THE DARK TOWER is an ambitious historical novel that situates intimate human dramas against the cataclysmic upheavals of late‑Victorian southern Africa—most centrally, the Anglo‑Zulu War of 1879 and its aftermath. The novel interleaves domestic scenes in rural Oxfordshire and London with richly observed travel episodes, garrison life, and two of the war’s pivotal sites—Isandhlwana and Rorke’s Drift—told from an array of vantage points. It opens in England with the ordinary shock of bereavement (an officer, Theodore Charles Reynolds — “Theo” — reported killed at Isandhlwana), and then expands into a sequence of journeys: of Theo as a young officer abroad, of Mrs Emiline Reynolds and Laura Brooke (his fiancée) on a pilgrimage to seek the grave that the official record says exists, and of various other characters who orbit the main pair—journalists, local guides, missionaries, and a young servant, Rejoice.
The novel is episodic rather than strictly linear: chapters are titled with a character name, place and date, and the book moves back and forth in time (1878–1880) and space (Oxfordshire, Cape Town, Durban, the veldt). Two parallel plot strands dominate: the private, inward odyssey of Laura Brooke—her grief, her decision to accompany Mrs Reynolds to South Africa, her encounters with the aftermath of battle, and her tangled relationship to the living men who survive—and the public, outward chronicle of the war as experienced by officers (Theo and his comrades) and by journalists (most notably Septimus Doyle). Intertwined with both is the story of a child of mixed parentage (Dora/Theodora), born in Cape Town and taken under Laura’s charge; this child becomes a pivot for questions of race, legitimacy, and what “home” might mean in an imperial age.
The narrative culminates emotionally and dramatically in the aftermath of Isandhlwana: the text stages both the brutal, disorienting carnage of the battle itself (Theo’s point of view) and the pilgrimage of those who come to find the dead (Laura’s arrival at the site months later). What gives the book a persistent tension is that the simple certainties of “dead” and “alive,” of honor and shame, are repeatedly blurred. The report of Theo’s death—printed, public, authoritative—exists alongside scenes in which he is seen alive, haunted, and transformed; the novel deliberately toys with resurrection and the idea of liminal survival, making ambiguity a structural and thematic device.