A writer who's been making waves in South Africa of late is a chap called Andrew Brown. In 2007 he walked off with the Sunday Times award for fiction - which is a big deal here - for a novel called Coldsleep Lullaby. Now the thing about Coldsleep Lullaby is that it intertwines two stories, a contemporary one and an historical one, and central to the contemporary story is a murder.
So, three years back when local crime novels were thin on the ground, some of us pulled Brown into the ranks. He came reluctantly it has to be said and I understand why. Coldsleep Lullaby used thriller techniques but it wasn't crime fiction, not in the conventional sense anyhow.
Now he's published another novel, Refuge, which involves crime and the underworld and a subject which has crept into dinkum crime fiction - the refugee in our cities. After all didn't Ian Rankin devote a whole book to the subject - Fleshmarket Close?
However, knowing Brown's uneasy about being tagged an author of crime fiction, I sat him down for a quiet chat about the nature of his new book and his attitude towards genre fiction.
Your novel Coldsleep Lullaby could be called a crime novel - certainly the contemporary story conforms to the conventions of a police procedural - but it also has a historical story which has nothing to do with the conventions of crime fiction. You always seem to have been a reluctant fellow traveller and I sense you would rather not be labelled.
To be perfectly honest, I was a bit surprised when Coldsleep Lullaby was categorised as a crime thriller, as I hadn't thought of it in that way at all. I suppose, on reflection, the categorisation is probably correct, in that there is a crime committed which requires investigation and an ultimate resolution. I am just very wary of labelling writing as one thing or another, for two reasons. Firstly, if for example you label a work as "chick lit", you immediately lose a whole group of readers who might otherwise read (and enjoy) a book.
Secondly, and more importantly for me, the label seems to reach far wider than just the book in question - the author becomes permanently associated with a particular genre, and that is really where my reluctance stems from. I have written four books, of which only one could be called a crime thriller (Coldsleep Lullaby), and yet I appear destined to languish perpetually in the category of 'crime writer'
Then along comes your new novel, Refuge, which is clearly not a crime novel in that it certainly doesn't abide by the conventions, yet some have put you back in the genre. Does this irritate?
It is a hard question to answer without seeming to denigrate the genre of crime writing, which is certainly not my intention. But yes, it does annoy me - not because there is anything inferior about crime writing, but because the categorisation is lazy and shows a lack of appreciation for what the book is really about. Refuge is not meant to be a crime thriller at all and I really don't feel that it falls into the genre of crime writing. It would be just as inappropriate for example to label it as 'erotica' merely because it contains some explicit scenes.
It is trying to be a social commentary - a protest almost - against the way in which we treat refugees and non-South Africans in this country. The commentary is embedded in a storyline that moves along at a fair pace in an attempt to keep the reader interested, but it is wholly secondary to the message that I am trying to convey.
Refuge has as its central character a lawyer, Richard Calloway, and certainly the story concerns a crime - the appalling treatment of refugees by the state - and the manipulation of their lives by criminal elements. So it is a story about crime...
For me, the title of the novel is an accurate encapsulation of the central theme: it is about people seeking refuge from things (one of those things being crime) and seeking refuge in things (in each other, in sex, in power). So crime is an important protagonist for the theme - it touches and manipulates every character in the book, but ultimately the book is not about the crime, but about how it devastates the people it affects.
On the other hand, Refuge is essentially a character study of a man going through a crisis, it just so happens that his personal crisis reveals a hidden world where people are treated shamefully.
Andrew Brown: Richard is a middle-aged white man living in a country that is swirling around him as if he were standing still. He isn't part of it and he doesn't understand it. His personal crisis nudges him off his protected platform and into the maelstrom. In that chaos he comes to understand the true depth of the horror that faces the vulnerable and poor, but he also comes to understand a whole lot more about himself and about how he actually fits in amongst those around him. It's a bit like driving past the same beggar your whole life, refusing to make eye-contact in case he asks you for something. Then one day your car breaks down right next to him. He helps you open the bonnet and you start to talk to him: it turns out that he knew your grandmother or that he worked in your grandfather's shop. An entire world of humanity opens up between you and you come to regret your self-imposed isolation.
Of course it is also about two other characters, the refugees Abayomi and her husband Ifasen. Indeed the story of Ifasen's destruction is a tale of horror as he meets violence and betrayal at all levels - on the street, in the hands of the cops and the courts, and in prison.
Abayomi and Ifasen are an amalgamation of stories that I heard on the streets, outside the department of home affairs, in the art bazaars and the drug houses around Cape Town. Vulnerability attracts tragedy and the stories that I heard from refugees in the city was one of abuse, corruption and violence.
There is no one to help them, other than other equally vulnerable members of their community, and they are fed upon by government officials, gangsters, the police and - if the truth be told - by businessmen, unscrupulous landlords and expedient entrepreneurs.
Refuge is highly critical of our judicial system. In fact the judicial system seems to exacerbate the refugee's position. Ifasen's experience being the case in point. But then we find that behind the scenes is the sinister figure of Svritsky - the Russian émigré who lurks in the underworld pulling the strings. He, too, is a refugee, yet he is able to work the system by exploiting the vulnerable. So there is a stark and awful contrast between the two groups of refugees: the privileged (by colour and class) and the detested (those from other African countries).
I am intrigued at how some immigrant communities can achieve a certain status within the city, while other communities remain downtrodden and defenceless. I have, in the course of my career as a lawyer and during interviews for Refuge, come across the Russians, the Israelis, the Chinese Triads and other similar powerful groups that exert an enormous influence on the commercial sector of the city and have access to the judicial system. Then there are the Somalian and Nigerian communities which seem to maintain some cohesion and unified activity, but remain targets for disaffected locals, the police and the politicians. The rest of the African refugees languish at the bottom of the food chain, being picked on by everyone else.
Do you think you will ever write genre fiction or do you prefer being outside the conventions in the freedomland of general fiction?
I have decided to write an interminably slow, navel-gazing philosophical treatise set in 18th century Finland in which the only deaths that occur are due to sheer boredom and suicidal depression. It will be like watching paint dry, only half as exciting. No one will have sex with anyone else (or contemplate having sex with anyone else), there will be no black people, and the following words will not appear anywhere in the text: "blood", "breast" or "nipple", "chocolate", "skin", "cock" or "penis" or "member", "mangled", "bruised" or "fractured".
I hope that this book - entitled Foucault and the Danish Problem - will finally allow me to overcome the categorisation as a 'crime writer'.
I imagine it almost certainly will launch him out of our ranks. Till next. Hang loose.
ITW International Committee Chair for South Africa, Mike Nicol, is a journalist and writer and now a hard-core crime fiction addict. He's published two crime novels - Payback and Out to Score (a co-authorship), and is a founder of the blog Crime Beat. He lives on Cape Town's peninsula, up a mountain, in the teeth of the wind.
