As the winter solstice approaches and we tilt into the deepest part of winter, it seems the right time to hibernate with good books. At the same time we swing into book awards season.
On the horizon is the Cape Town Book Fair and concurrent with it are the M-Net Awards for novels in all the official languages. The winner of the M-Net English Fiction Award will be announced at the fair on June 13.
So there is time to read the shortlisted novels and decide which you would choose as winner. They are, in author alphabetical order: The Impostor by Damon Galgut (Penguin), Bodies Politic by Michiel Heyns (Jonathan Ball), The Rowing Lesson by Anne Landsman (Kwela), Shepherds & Butchers by Chris Marnewick (Umuzi) and The One That Got Away by Zoe Wicomb (Umuzi). The winner gets R30 000 — and will sell many more books.
Why do people still read and love novels? Virginia Woolf suggested about a century ago that a good book would “purify the heart and enlarge the mind”. There is something deeply satisfying about that idea, as indeed there is about a good novel. But novels are expensive, even in soft cover, so nag (or beg) the library or start (or join) a book club.
This year’s submissions are good. It was not easy for the judges — I was one — to decide on the shortlist. So to have made it thus far is a measure of a book’s excellence.
Other novels that made it to the composite longlist were Moxyland by Lauren Beukes, The Lighted Rooms by Richard Mason, My Life with the Duvals by Tim Keegan and Heartfruit by Ingrid Wolfaardt.
Many scholarly articles have been written about the purpose and worth of literary prizes, how judges should be selected and what criteria should be used to evaluate novels. This year the three judges for the English Fiction Award were Leon de Kock, head of the School of Languages and Literature at Wits, Ross Devenish, filmmaker and producer, and me, a reviewer for the Mail & Guardian.
All judges have their own ways of selecting a good novel, but some criteria that emerged in our panel were that a novel should be: highly readable, memorable, original, complex in conception, relevant to South Africa, well written, have serious themes and an extended scope of vision and depth of characterisation. But reading a novel is a joy and an art, not an exact science. Intuition, experience, joie de vivre, seriousness and the love of good language all play a part.
The criteria for submissions for the M-Net award were that a novel must be written in English, by a South African citizen and must have been published in South Africa for the first time the preceding year (in 2008). The writer did not have to be resident in South Africa. Translations from other languages were not permitted.
This year few novels by black writers were submitted in the English category and none made it to the shortlist (except Zoë Wicomb’s and it is debatable whether she would call herself black in this context). Mandla Langa’s novel, The Lost Colours of the Chameleon, could not be accepted for the submissions as he is a long-time patron of this award.
Of the novels that almost made it to the shortlist this year, The Lighted Rooms by Richard Mason is a beautifully written account of an elderly woman’s descent into a form of dementia in which she creates a coherent reality for herself from bits and pieces of the past and present.
My Life with the Duvals by Tim Keegan is a gentle satire on the southern suburbs and academic life in Cape Town. A friendship and a seemingly happy marriage turn unexpectedly nasty.
Heartfruit by Ingrid Wolfaardt is set on a fruit farm in the Western Cape. It is a family saga that covers three generations.
Moxyland by Lauren Beukes moves from fiction dealing with struggle politics to a conception of the future in which corporate business is all-powerful and engaged in a tyrannous suppression of the population.
Most of this year’s shortlisted novels have previously been reviewed in the Mail & Guardian archives at www.mg.co.za
The Impostor by Damon Galgut is set in a Karoo town where Adam, recently retrenched, has gone to start writing poetry. He becomes involved with various characters around the dorp, especially one Canning, who claims an old and deep acquaintance with him. Sinister and strange, this is a gripping read in which ordinary people make what they can out of the post-1994 era.
Bodies Politic by Michiel Heyns is an extraordinary achievement of historical representation in which the reader is thrown into the lives of three Pank-hurst women and the suffragette movement in the early 20th century. Heyns has perfected the idiom and concerns of the time and the nuances of family relationships between women. The sacrifices made for politics have resonance in South Africa today.
The Rowing Lesson by Anne Landsman is a poetic fictional memoir in which the narrator, Betty, sits beside her dying father and reconstructs his life story. She tells it to him, so it is in the second person, which is initially confusing, but deeply engaging. She melds together his memories and hers of her grandparents and the river at Wilderness with his life as a country doctor in Worcester and her life in New York. It is funny and irreverent, full of the love, quarrels and heartache of families near and far, at home and emigrated.
Shepherds & Butchers by Chris Marnewick is a remarkable first novel, dealing with the death penalty. It is a sort of courtroom drama in which a young prison warder is on trial for the fatal shooting of eight men. As a defence his advocate explores what happened in his mind and how things came to pass for this young man. In some ways a passionate indictment of the death penalty, in others the state of crime in the country is ruthlessly exposed.
The One That Got Away by Zoë Wicomb is a collection of short stories connected in clever ways with one another. They are set in South Africa and Glasgow, drawing together various strands of people’s lives. She looks at transracial relationships and examines the lives of coloured women in particular detail. Her style is sophisticated and simple and often enlivened by colloquial Cape Flats Afrikaans.
This is a wonderful shortlist and great credit to readers and writers who keep this corner of South African cultural life so vibrantly alive.