Night Journey (Fiction / Poetry)

This is the tale of a South African soldier who turns conscientious objector and is subjected to 188 days in a punishment cell in solitary confinement.

Set in South Africa during the '60s and '70s, it is a novel about a young soldier who deserts the army and when he is recaptured by the military he refuses to return to military service on religious grounds. For his insubordination, he is placed in an extreme regime of solitary confinement for a long period, where he experiences the eponymous "night journey" of dreams, visions and memories, which lead him to find himself. The story of the young soldier's life emerges as a stream of consciousness, in the present tense, and gradually the narrator's backstory and his psychological state are filled in through a mixture of dreams, recollections, and flashbacks, intercut with scenes from the on-going present. It is an erratic and chaotic life with a hopeless father and a wild and wayward mother who often live on the shady side of the law; all this is set against a brooding and violent background of South Africa at war with its neighbors and itself.

Roderick Mackenzie was born in Zimbabwe in 1957 but lived in South Africa from the age of two. After matriculating he worked as a landscape designer and owned a garden centre. He and his wife immigrated to Britain in 2001 and for the past ten years they have lived in the historic village of Amersham in Buckinghamshire. During this time Roderick acquired his Master's degree in Jungian and Post Jungian studies from the University of Essex and he now practices as a dream analyst.