Inside every journalist is a novel — which is an excellent place for it to be.
This counsel by United Kingdom pressman Russell Lyne is ignored by countless scribes, and not least South African journos. But one who successfully made the journey from journalist to novelist is Peter Temple. He originally worked at the Argus and the former Sunday Express.
His trajectory was also one from being South African to becoming Australian. Recently, the media in his adopted country have been claiming him as the first ”Australian” to win international honours for crime writing.
Temple moved ”down” there in 1980, and JM Coetzee is a more recent arrival. In authorial terms of trade, it’s Australia two, South Africa nil.
It was his book The Broken Shore that got him the top global prize (a Gold Dagger), but Temple already has many Aussie accolades for the eight books under his belt. This success doesn’t come as a surprise. He’s a man who taught journalism to people like Peter Bruce — editor of Business Day, also a catchy writer.
In an editing class I had with Temple in 1976, he banned the word ”situation”, saying it wasn’t concrete enough. (But the master himself breaks a journalistic rule: I don’t think he names the dogs that bounce through the course of his winning novel.)
In the old days, Temple taught South African students the ”Fog Index”, and lo — in applying this device, Amazon.com records that 95% of its catalogue is harder to read than The Broken Shore.
Temple explains his style: ”I went from reporting to sub-editing where I was brutalised by ancient subs where the emphasis was brevity, brevity, brevity.” It’s also the way people speak, he says, in that they don’t spell things out.
So that’s how he writes. ”It’s not a style that’s common. I owe it to journalism, to listening and to editing,” he says, admitting also to editing his work so much that he deliberately sometimes lapses into the incomprehensible. ”I only put the stuff back in when my editors object.”
Being away from South Africa means that Temple’s crime topics don’t resonate much with the issues back here. His criminals are paedophiles and drug importers, not crooks like Brett Kebble or hijackers like those in Tsotsi. Also hard to imagine for South Africa, in The Broken Shore the hero is a police officer.
Temple says he has accumulated Australian identity over his South African one. Early on he felt ”completely alienated” from his new country, but he also found apartheid South Africa hard to identify with: ”Aware of what I was heir to, I didn’t want that burden.” He adds: ”I always felt I would leave, and never had the courage to stay and make change. I was born to exile and when you know that about yourself, you are gone long before you leave.”
In Australia, Temple wanted to write books, but was intimidated at first because he saw the country through the eyes of a foreigner. But working to don a new identity makes for extra powers of observation. His winning work has super-sharp cameos of Australian racism, class prejudice and environmental pillage.
As a South African reader, you feel the vivid contrast with our current-day castrated cops when you experience the way Temple paints their Aussie equivalents as nothing less than self-assured authoritarians. Yet it’s action, not images, that drive this writer’s story. Characters and reader alike get buffeted about by all kinds of rip currents. Sometimes the plot slows down while the protagonist prepares a meal, and then it’s back into a ricocheting dialogue.
Temple packs in so many people that one is compelled keep on reading just in order to place who’s who. ”I like a complicated story,” he admits. It’s an extra struggle if you’re new to words such as ”boon” (a derogatory word for Aboriginal), ”loon” (hooligan) and ”swaggie” (itinerant). But that’s part of the locatedness of his books.
What do Australians feel about ”their” author? The response, Temple says, is: ”This is right; this is the way it is.” For him, ”If I failed in that, it would mean I was back in the outsider position.”
In the 1970s, Temple showed layout students you could tilt a person’s photo against a vertical page of text, so that the angle of the nose rendered them either sheepish or deceitful (former United States president Richard Nixon was the case material). Nowadays, he has fun playing around with plots. But does he think that novels can convey more about life than journalism?
”There’s a lot more you can say in fiction … but journalism is the only thing that brings things out of hiding,” he says.
I guess, just as long as they keep the writing tight.