It is once more time for South Africa’s most lavish fiction award – but now it’s adults only, writes SHAUN DE WAAL
IN the absence of the CNA Literary Award, which was discontinued earlier this year, the M-Net Book Prize for a South African novel takes on a new importance. It always was the most lavish in monetary terms (R50 000!), but now it is the only large award for published fiction in South Africa. Its concern to include all of our 11 official languages is also commendable.
Born out of a desire for material that could be adapted for television or film, though that aspect has been dropped, the M- Net prize has a more explicitly popular agenda than the CNA award had. The judges’ guidelines suggest that the prize go to a novel that has “literary merit, a strong narrative content, accessibility to a broad reading public and relevance to actualities”.
This year, the titles shortlisted in the English category show a mix, in varying degrees, of those qualities. Perhaps the most overtly popular of them is Jo-Ann Richards’s The Innocence of Roast Chicken, which has already been the focus of some debate in the press. It arrived with much blaring of publicity trumpets, and has sold very well, though it also received somewhat sneering reviews.
One paper – the reviewing policy of which was under fire – tried to concoct a little extra controversy by pitting Richards against another author, Zakes Mda, whose Ways of Dying is also shortlisted for the M-Net Book Prize (his other 1996 novel, She Plays With the Darkness, didn’t make the cut). Playing on the obvious contrasts of race and gender, the Richards-versus-Mda title-fight may make amusing copy, and controversy can be good publicity, but such staged antagonism does little to clarify the issues at stake.
Richards’s book may, in fact, already have suffered because its ambitions were misconstrued amid the hype. It is an example of popular women’s fiction, but was treated to stringent literary (and thus also historical and political) criticism. More self-consciously literary novels like Mda’s, or Paul Clingman’s A State of Symmetry, another of the shortlisted titles, may be better able to withstand such examinations.
The one other shortlisted book, Love Themes for the Wilderness by Ashraf Jamal, is an interesting anomaly, in a way, as it is a literary novel that is deliberately unliterary – though, at the same time, it makes few of the concessions that are expected of popular novels. Its self- limitations and its eschewal of the usual conventions for grabbing the reader’s attention account for both its strengths and its weaknesses.
There is, at any rate, a good spread of work on the shortlist, and, as always, it will be fascinating to see which of the apples, pears or oranges the judges put first. The tussle between literariness and accessibility is one every M-Net Book Prize judging panel must grapple with, more desperately in some years than in others.
This year, at least, there won’t be a result of the kind that had brows furrowing two years ago, when a novel for teenagers won above the most recent JM Coetzee opus.
I was a judge in the M-Net Book Prize last year, and it was hard to adjudicate between the competing claims of adult literary novels and those of teen fiction – let alone to factor in the relative worth of easy-reading texts for neo-literates. Such works should, indeed, receive attention, but not perhaps in the same category as a decidedly highbrow novel such as Damon Galgut’s The Quarry, which was shortlisted last year.
Then, the problem was particularly acute: out of 15 books submitted for the prize, only four were full-length novels for adults. Of the rest, there were a couple of notable titles for teens, which were shortlisted, but it was still difficult to place them in direct competition with The Quarry or Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples (which ultimately won).
I was not the only judge to raise this problem in the structure of the awards, and adjustments were made in time for this year’s submissions. Twelve novels in all were submitted, and the shortlisted four seem a good selection from the 12, though Chris van Wyk’s The Year of the Tapeworm – which was well-received upon publication – is a noteworthy omission.
At least there were 12 adult novels by South Africans published in 1996, 10 of them printed in the country. That in itself is an encouraging sign that our literary culture is still expanding, still has ambitions.
The winner of the M-Net Book Prize will be announced at a banquet on Saturday May 24