I am so very pleased, through this prize, to be associated with Olive Schreiner, and would like to thank the committee for considering a detective novel for this prestigious literary award. I have in the past weeks been trying to imagine why detective fiction would have mattered to Olive Schreiner.
One of the earliest works to demonstrate the key elements of what has become identified with the detective novel is the 18th-century fiction Caleb Williams, by William Godwin. Godwin was a founder intellectual of the radical movement in England and was married (in most unconventional terms) to Mary Wollstonecraft, whose work on women’s rights must surely have provided Schreiner with much of her own powerful radicalism. Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women still stands as a beacon.
James comments that while Caleb Williams ”has many of the elements of classical detection, a central mystery, physical clues, an amateur detective, a pursuit and disguise,” Godwin’s conviction was that any legal system itself was inherently pernicious. My citation here from the author ”James” refers to PD rather than to Henry. PD James herself is one of the most thoughtful and ethically engaged detective writers of our era, and she observes that Godwin ”believed in an ideal anarchy in which there would be no war, no crimes, no administration and no government.”
Charles Dickens is not in the same terms a radical, but his own brilliant indictment of the law in Bleak House situates him as an unlikely interlocutor with Godwin, although for Dickens, anarchy is the alibi of corruption rather than its cure. His astonishing novel Bleak House examines the social and moral devastation of a failed judicial system. Ultimately the police redeem the law, and Inspector Bucket investigates, solves the mystery and resolves the plot. In Little Dorrit Dickens examines the misery and injustice of the penal system. Originally he had intended to call the work Nobody’s Fault, as a satirical comment on the failure of ethics within judicial and legal processes. And it is here that I pick up again the thread to Schreiner, in her allegorical novella, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland.
Raised and educated in Southern Africa under British Imperial (mis)rule, Schreiner was heir to Godwin and Dickens, and would no doubt have read the works of them both. While her own writing advocates a more radical political programme than that evident in Dickens, she must have had a sceptical understanding of how, within the British colonial context, Godwin’s Jacobin ideals of ”no administration and no government” could be abused through the logic of imperial adventurism. Originally attracted by the personal magnetism of Rhodes, she became deeply critical of the free hand with which the Chartered Company was allowed to expropriate land and wealth, outside of the due process of British law. For her it meant, in devastating effect, that whatever might happen in the empire would effectively be counted as ”nobody’s fault”.
The novella opens with Trooper Peter Halket sitting alone on a rocky kopje drowsing beside a small fire. The dull and naïve youth fills his head with the delusional dream of imperial profiteering. He imagines himself as owner of a vast mining company, and in his mind he fantasises about the accrual of wealth through trading in shares. ”Well, if they didn’t like to sell out at the right time, it was their own faults. Why didn’t they? He, Peter Halket, did not feel responsible for them … Other men had come to South Africa with nothing, and had made everything! Why should not he?”
As he gazes into the fire, what he sees is the image of the ”fires they had made to burn the natives’ grain by … the skull of the old Mashona blown off at the top … Then he thought suddenly of a young black woman he and another man caught alone in the bush, her baby on her back, but young and pretty. Well, they didn’t shoot her.”
Schreiner knew of the effects of mystification, and understood well enough what behaviours are licensed, once collectivities of people embrace the principle that it is ”nobody’s fault”. She became a witness for the prosecution, insisting, wherever she found brutality, that systems and persons should be held to account. It was a gross injustice that one British law pertained in England, and another in the colonies.
The apotheosis of popular fiction in the British 19th-century was Conan Doyle’s invention of the detective Sherlock Holmes. Surely much of the success of this character lay in its promise of consolation for an Imperial generation. Criminality would be identified, evil punished, and truth and reason would ultimately prevail. The horror of anything outside of such a sentiment asserts itself as a mortal fear in Conan Doyle’s The Cardboard Box: ”What is the meaning of it, Watson?” Holmes asks. ”What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable.”
By way of a closing comment I will read a brief passage from Of Wild Dogs, lines that probably have more to do with Olive Schreiner than even I was aware. It is in the closing moments of the novel. Trails of responsibility have been identified through the pragmatic diligence of Inspector Cicero Matyobeni. We have reached the point at which, given the conventions of genre, the plot demands that the writer engage with matters of justice.
‘Spyker seemed not to understand that he might attempt to explain why he had found it so easy to kill Toni and Jessica, why his knife had found no resistance in the warp and the woof of canvas as he sliced his way into the moon-dark tent. He had no narrative that linked his action to the years bearing his mother’s Afrikaans shame in his father’s bullying and contemptuous English household, where words and phrases that he had learned during the day were banished in the evening hours, sweet round words like katjie, voël and bloekom, as well as sharp strong words like mes and vryf.
”Although it was a fair account of being his father’s son, Spyker himself knew that this was not the explanation. It did not capture the pleasure of the blade, and the blood-warm warmth of blood. Nor why he must be on top of and inside of and slashing and tearing and drowning in power. Such things do not trail back down a single corridor to ‘because’.”
To write a detective novel now, particularly within the context of post-colonial, post-TRC South Africa, is to feel Schreiner’s obligation to assert that society cannot function outside of a moral economy, while conceding that our interpretation of Who is at Fault is at worst opportunistic and at best partial.
Jane Taylor’s Of Wild Dogs shares the 2006 Olive Schreiner Prize for Prose with Russell Brownlee’s Garden of the Plagues