Shaun de Waal
If the English shortlist of this year’s M-Net Book Prize (announced this week in Cape Town) is anything to go by, South African novelists are still dealing with this country’s history, its national narrative, whether recent or more distant.
Ken Barris’s novel The Jailer’s Book portrays an apartheid-era South Africa through the personae and stories of Dolf, a prison warder, and Grintz, a political prisoner and writer who has his own take on the jailer’s unhappy life.
Kafka’s Curse by Achmat Dangor deals with the relationships of an extended family, making pivotal play out of racial and religious allegiances, whether through trans-racial love affairs or the attempt to live outside the ethnic boundaries imposed by apar theid.
Pamela Jooste’s book, Dance with a Poor Man’s Daughter, revisits the coloured community’s expulsion from places such as District Six, portraying that community through the eyes of a precocious 11-year-old.
In The Telling of Angus Quain, Jenny Hobbs probes the submerged stories beneath the rise and fall of a Reef mining magnate, with the implications such hidden histories have for a society built on the search for such wealth.
Jann Turner’s novel, Heartland, uses current issues such as the new land claims legislation as the motor for a plot involving murder and love across colour barriers.
The above list is alphabetical by author’s name, but Barris’s novel, I think, deserves its place at the head of the list on more than alphabetical grounds. In purely literary terms (and I plead guilty to highbrow tastes), it is the best of the bunch: the most complex, most serious of them – serious in the sense that the writing is densely metaphorical and it treats serious themes with nuance and w
ithout a fear of being less, or more, than entertaining.
But, not surprisingly for a television pay-channel, the issue of entertainment is one that the M-Net Book Prize asks its judges to consider. It requires that they judge a book by its relevance to national public concerns and its novelistic inventiveness, but a strong narrative is an indispensible element. The prize’s paradigm of evaluation makes explicit reference to accessibility, tilting toward
the popular novel as its favoured mode.
In that case, Turner’s Heartland is top of the heap. It meets all the expectations of the popular novel, with an accelerating plot involving murder, mystery, suspense, passion – all very skilfully designed and handled. It will doubtless make an excellent television miniseries when it fulfils its destiny and becomes one.
Reviewers in this paper and elsewhere have seen occluded depths in the novel, but I think it is a mistake to invest it with more significance than it possesses. The characters often come perilously close to stereotypes, and the backdrop of a country in t he throes of turbulent change is just that – a backdrop.
Dance with a Poor Man’s Daughter has received conflicting responses. One reviewer found it unconsciously racist, given to making negative assumptions about coloured people. Such a risk is one taken by a white author treating this subject matter, and deci ding whether Jooste pulls it off may depend to a large degree on the position and prejudices of the reader. It is, nonetheless, a fluent and inter esting novel, with many touches of vibrant life in its cast of characters, and has already been crowned with the best first novel award in the Commonwealth Prize’s Africa section.
Kafka’s Curse is an impressive and unusual novel, with an adventurous structure that swivels between various points of view and the courage to leave its own ambivalence unresolved.
Then there’s Hobbs’s book, which is a disappointment: the real heart of the narrative appears to take place at some distance from the surface story, discussed and not described, and the characters never fully convince.
The most notable omissions from the shortlist are Michael Cawood Green’s tricksy Sinking, a “verse novella” (which may disqualify it), and Michael Williams’s gritty novel for teenagers, Who Killed Jimmy Valentine? The list as it stands is, however, a rea sonably strong one, and should provide some tough meat for chewing over by the judges when they decide who’ll get the R50 000 purse in a few month s’ time.