Henrietta Rose-Innes
Rose-Innes is a novelist and short-story writer of note: the 2008 winner of the Caine Prize for African writing, shortlisted for the M-Net and Sunday Times literary awards, second place in the BBC International Short Story Awards, and has been translated and given prizes in French, Spanish, German and numerous other languages.
Set in Cape Town and translated into French as L’Homme au Lion, this is a cautionary look at Man and his relationship with nature. Published in 2015, it uses the Mother City and a possible future as a backdrop. There is little contact with the wild in this universe. People hide behind their enclosed homes (not unfamiliar), wildlife is carefully kept separate and our connection with nature is merely symbolic. Parks officials are especially concerned with the big-cat project. Our protagonist, Con, takes the place of an injured friend who looked after the project’s black-maned lioness. She becomes his world and, in beautiful prose, the author takes the reader to this nearly lost future of mankind. Humans’ relationship with the natural world is threadbare and Con and lioness Sekhmet become the symbolic connection.
What will man’s future be if he has no contact with nature, when he no longer has soulmates in nature? How will humans face the cult of animal lovers who seek to claim the lioness as their own, thus endangering it? A red light in the taut but lyrical prose of Rose-Innes.
Published in 2011, this book earned Rose-Innes the François Sommer Literary Prize in 2015 for its French translation.
Nineveh is a luxury estate outside Cape Town. The unexpected happens: Nineveh is attacked by an out-of-control swarm of insects. Katya Grub is the one to rid Nineveh’s wealth-encased citizens of this strange infestation. She is the owner of Painless Pest Relocations. But this is not the beginning of Katya’s unruly story. She comes with her own miserable baggage: a father who creates chaos in her private and public world. The difference between opulence and poverty is her shadow in the Nineveh project.
Katya is not an exterminator who swipes the bad away. She values life and wants to give the swarm a better place to live. But her father is an exterminator. This is as original a book as any reader could hope for.
Charlie Human
Human is described by Lauren Beukes (another of our favourite South African sci-fi authors) as “mad, dark, irreverent and wonderfully twisted in the right ways”. Human’s “hero” is Baxter Zevcenko, a teenage schoolboy.
Again Cape Town is the setting, albeit the schoolyard and teenagers – mindboggling youngsters: porn- and drug-peddling, sex-driven, alcoholswilling, uncaring of adult concerns, living dangerous and gang- and clickridden lives. We meet Baxter and his girlfriend, Esme, his strange friends – and a serial killer who causes mayhem. Baxter is the kingpin of one of the groups (the porn-spreading one) and though not a likeable guy, we are concerned when his girlfriend is kidnapped. Baxter becomes the intrepid searcher and uncovers a supernatural underworld. We meet zombies and shape-shifters, creatures of all kinds. Luckily he has a partner: bounty-hunter Jackson ‘Jackie’ Ronin, a boozesoaked bearded supernatural. This team roams the underworld and finds that the whole world staggers on the brink of an apocalypse. But it is a South African world and thus the achingly local cliché ‘now-now’. As Human explains the term:
“A common South Africanism relating to the amount of time to elapse before an event occurs. In the near future; not happening presently but to happen shortly.” So the team has time on its side. This Baxter adventure is not just noir or sci-fi; our history is included and Baxter’s autistic brother has a bizarre interest in all the British and South African war-skirmishes. Our country’s mythology is interwoven with dwarves and spirits and our hero’s actionpacked mission in this captivating fiction. Read Apocalypse Now Now and be intrigued enough to seek out the followup odyssey.
Nobody in Cape Town appreciaties Baxters ‘superhero’ escapades. He wandered through an underworld besieged by weirdos to save his girlfriend. But who cares? Those in charge have sent him to a new school. Aptly named Hexpoort, it is part reformatory and part militaryschool. And he is faced with the school’s Chosen One, a bully of renown. Then his school has to face an apocalyptic onslaught and Baxter and his friend, Jackson, step in. But we won’t spoil it for you. Grab a copy and give it a read.
Building South Africa through better roads