Litnet

A library to flee
First published as Die biblioteek aan die einde van die wêreld – Tafelberg Publishers in 2019
English translation by Henrietta Rose-Innes, A library to flee – also published by Tafelberg, in 2022
Etienne van Heerden
Tafelberg Publishers
ISBN: 9780624091059

This reader impression was written and sent to LitNet on the writer's own initiative.

Spoiler alert: If you haven’t read the book yet, please note that the article below contains information that will give the plot away.

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In mid-2016, Etienne van Heerden, riding a mountain bike in the Jonkershoek near his home in Stellenbosch, crashed and broke a number of ribs. He spent days thereafter on painkillers, the result of which was often vivid dreams, dreams sometimes about a library at the end of the world.

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In mid-2016, Etienne van Heerden, riding a mountain bike in the Jonkershoek near his home in Stellenbosch, crashed and broke a number of ribs. He spent days thereafter on painkillers, the result of which was often vivid dreams, dreams sometimes about a library at the end of the world.

From early 2017, Van Heerden worked on turning these images into a complete and complex story. This took two and a half years, and in mid-2019 he and Tafelberg Publishers brought to the world the book Die biblioteek aan die einde van die wêreld. Thereafter followed some meticulous work by Henrietta Rose-Innes to effect an English language version. This, in turn, Van Heerden presented to a Veldsoirée at Cradock, the town of his birth, in late September 2022, and this translation has the name A library to flee (Library). It is to this translation that this review refers.

I mention this history to make it clear that Library is not a five-minute wonder. Van Heerden has worked determinedly over years, with friends and trusted advisors; he has travelled Europe and Africa, and particularly China, researching this book; and he has presented sections at symposiums and conferences, all to mould and craft this work into what it now is. It seems extraordinary that after such a long process of research and soliciting so much advice, of listening carefully and of writing and rewriting, a work as fresh and as lively and as sparkling as this one has emerged. This suggests that we are here in the hands of a master writer. Let’s see if that is true.

The story of Library is as convoluted and unpredictable as a Mozartean opera, with characters coming and going, and with substories, deviations, cul-de-sacs, wanderings off and around, and red herrings, all everywhere, making summary quite impossible.

The characters, more numerous than those in the Bible – not really, but you know what I mean – are kaleidoscopic in their explosions of colour, all emerging from the firecracker imagination and wicked humour of the author. Library is a fantastic ride for the reader, often bewildering in its storyline, with clues and hints and direction arrows popping up so often, and so unexpectedly, and often so misleadingly, that keeping on the road is one hell of a job. It’s all extraordinary and beguiling, but, I believe, there is a central story that slowly emerges, and a social issue that is all-pervasive, as follows below.

The story begins in the offices of Brand, Nortier & Cele Inc, a legal practice housed in the glass penthouse atop a trendy downtown tower in Cape Town. Partner Ian Brand is meeting a group of five Stellenbosch businessmen, and it doesn’t take Ian long to imagine that they, and the technology start-up they represent, could connect back into the “Stellenbosch Mafia”.

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The story begins in the offices of Brand, Nortier & Cele Inc, a legal practice housed in the glass penthouse atop a trendy downtown tower in Cape Town. Partner Ian Brand is meeting a group of five Stellenbosch businessmen, and it doesn’t take Ian long to imagine that they, and the technology start-up they represent, could connect back into the “Stellenbosch Mafia”.

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Led by Grotius de Grootte, the group is “sussing” Ian out, for Ian has published on aspects of facial recognition technology, and that is the group’s interest. For one of the five is an “extraordinary professor” of engineering at Stellenbosch University who has spent his sabbatical at a university in Shanghai, where he was introduced to developing software in the recognition field that will, in De Grootte’s words, “blow you out of the water”. If this technology can be used in the Boland’s lifestyle estates, it will surely eliminate criminal intrusion there. Then it could be upscaled to neighbourhoods, shopping malls, maybe whole cities. “The whole fucking country,” one of De Grootte’s colleagues mutters.

The end of crime, and a bloody good, huge business.

But De Grootte sees a problem. It is one thing to catch on camera a jaywalker in Shanghai and to plaster his or her image and name over screens all over downtown almost immediately, which is already happening, but South Africa has a constitution that safeguards individual privacy, other laws that entrench it, and activist courts that could go in any direction. De Grootte wants help here, to find out the limits of the possible, and he is visiting Ian to see if they can work together. Ian is excited by the prospect of another nice juicy account, and De Grootte is becoming comfortable. The meeting parts with all in a good mood, both sides seeing potential in the relationship.

But unbeknown to both De Grootte and Ian, there was another shark in the pond, and this was to prove to be a fearsome creature.

“Cat” Khumalo had grown up in Lingelithe township, now part of Cradock in the dry and dusty Eastern Cape Karoo. There, he was a friend of Matthew Goniwe, the schoolteacher who was also a massively energetic UDF activist. Politics got into Cat’s blood there, and was never to leave him.

He married young, and shortly thereafter he and his bride were spirited out of South Africa, to become part of the ANC’s exile movement. Starting in Europe, where their daughter and only child, Thuli, was born, they were moved by the ANC to London. Things were difficult there, in their flat in Hogarth Road near Earl’s Court, and had it not been for the decency of the Indian restaurant below their flat, who sent them tikka chicken dinners, things could well have become intolerable.

But Cat was soon high up in the exile movement, and suddenly, to the surprise of all, the Rivonia trialists were freed, a few at a time, and it was clear that the last of them, the legendary Nelson Mandela, was soon also to be freed.

His release is now the stuff of history, and the photos of that day, with Mandela on the balcony of the Cape Town City Hall, are in the history books. At Mandela’s side on the balcony is Cyril Ramaphosa, and at Cyril’s side, Cat Khumalo. Cat could not have been better positioned.

And so it worked out.

A few years later, the little family owned a super home in Cape Town’s southern suburbs, with a Porsche Cayenne in the garage, and Thuli, now about 30 years old, was enrolled at UCT doing a postgraduate class in translation. This course was run by Dr Stephen Eliot, a graduate of York University in his home country, England, who had subsequently “gone up” to Oxford for his doctorate. Thence to the colonies, and the University of Cape Town to be exact, to run this class, attended, coincidentally, by Thuli Khumalo and Ian Brand. And another of Van Heerden’s extraordinary characters, Jerome Maarman, whom we will meet later.

But Cat Khumalo is clearly up to something, his daughter concludes. For Cat now has an inseparable comrade, Sello from the domestic wing, apparently tasked to advise Cat on the lie of the local land. This advice is given mostly in the study at Cat’s home, behind a closed door, while accompanied by bottle after bottle of whisky. In this study is a safe, which Thuli finds contains an endless supply of banknotes. Where from? Rumours are that Cat is No 1’s fixer and is working on the nuclear power deal with Russia, and that kickbacks are the order of the day. (“No 1” is the moniker given to Jacob Zuma when he was president – Van Heerden began writing while Zuma was president – although Van Heerden never puts a name to the president, leaving it to you – as Pravin Gordhan once said – to “connect the dots”.)

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But even this explanation does not cover all the facts, and Thuli continues to snoop.

Gradually, she cracks the code and gets into Cat’s Apple iMac, and the whole truth becomes clear. Not only is her father skimming it off from the Russians, but he and Sello have established contacts in Shanghai in the field of recognition technology.

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But even this explanation does not cover all the facts, and Thuli continues to snoop.

Gradually, she cracks the code and gets into Cat’s Apple iMac, and the whole truth becomes clear. Not only is her father skimming it off from the Russians, but he and Sello have established contacts in Shanghai in the field of recognition technology. From this, they have proposed to No 1 that the country as a whole adopt this as a project, for two reasons: firstly, the information obtained could well make the ANC impregnable at election time; and secondly, the kickbacks from a contract to purchase the system and millions of cameras, etc, would not only fill out No 1’s pension spectacularly, but could do the Khumalos and their friends no harm either.

The study also contains other documents that Thuli uncovers, and the information here makes her blood run cold. For her father has recorded that this project could never be concluded in the final few years of No 1’s presidency. The only way to conclude it is to create endless social disturbances, thereby allowing No 1 to call a state of emergency and postpone elections. The turmoil would have to be so intense and overwhelming as to justify this, and endure for long enough for the project to be concluded. And it appears to have already been started.

This is nothing short of revolution, with endless bloodshed designed to ensure one-party rule, and vast spending of public funds to ensure splendid kickbacks to a handful of insiders. Thuli will have none of this.

This means also that there were, in fact, two groupings aiming to profit out of Shanghai’s recognition technology simultaneously, and that only one knew of the other, for Cat and Sello had an unbeatable set of contacts, and they rapidly became aware of the innocents in Stellenbosch. Here comes trouble.

This is the beginning of the story of Library, and we will return to this story later.

Meanwhile, the social issue that Van Heerden addresses in Library?

Van Heerden retired from his Hofmeyr Professorship at the University of Cape Town after 20 years of service, at the end of 2016. He had thus been on this campus through the Sturm und Drang of the FeesMustFall activity, which had been at its most intense in October 2015 and August 2016. These times feature prominently in Library, and I would like to give my crude summary of the fallout of the Fallist movement.

I suggest that there were four major fallouts from this movement. Some were good, some not so.

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Firstly, the Fallist movement took South Africa to a period of near-universal access to university education. It won the moving of the funding responsibility for university education from banks and bursary funds, with their inherent biases, to the state.

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Firstly, the Fallist movement took South Africa to a period of near-universal access to university education. It won the moving of the funding responsibility for university education from banks and bursary funds, with their inherent biases, to the state. This was a terrific development, and university enrolment, which was at about 300 000 in 1994, has risen to nearly 1 000 000 today, with many on adequate bursaries from the state.

Secondly, the Fallist movement, in a crude phrase, kicked the shit out of the arrogance of the English language universities. I claim something of personal knowledge of the English language white community, being part of it myself.

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Secondly, the Fallist movement, in a crude phrase, kicked the shit out of the arrogance of the English language universities. I claim something of personal knowledge of the English language white community, being part of it myself.

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“The Afrikaner, aka Dutchman, was never up to understanding the task of running South Africa, and their apartheid idea was rubbish. Thankfully, we never supported that. And now the blacks – well, much nicer fellows, but not managers, and too easily tempted to corruption. No, we don’t support their ANC, and we know we are right – again.” Hugh Murray’s remark, “The ANC couldn’t run a bath, let alone a country,” fits well here. The Fallists forced a re-examination of the ethos of the smug belief in whiteness on campuses, and this was long overdue.

Thirdly, colonialism and whiteness in our broader society were put under a harsh light, and neither came out well. It was time for black people to assert their dominant position, and that began here.

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Thirdly, colonialism and whiteness in our broader society were put under a harsh light, and neither came out well. It was time for black people to assert their dominant position, and that began here.

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And fourthly, the movement exposed much nascent anger against “whites”. Whites were not divided into good and bad (or anything in between); they became just “whites”, and were dismissible as such. Julius Malema took this to the extreme (as always): “We have not told our people to kill whites – not yet.”

Van Heerden moves his book into the territory of the last three of these issues. This is incredibly brave – bigger names than “Etienne van Heerden” have come out of this minefield blown to pieces. He notes that he has drawn most of the argument and exposition here from social media and publicly available websites – a good move, giving him some space and a few references. And he has submitted Library to two sensitivity readers before publishing. Also wise. One doesn’t want to lose a good book for one stray sentence.

And then he plunges into these issues, in detail, and always through Socratic dialogue – you will never find Van Heerden’s opinion here, but you will certainly find that of his characters. And they come at the issues from all possible angles as they maul each other in debate. Great stuff.

And now the characters.

There are two characters who stay the pace of the entire novel, from beginning to end. Thuli Khumalo and Ian Brand.

Thuli we have already briefly met.

Born in Europe with parents in exile, as a young girl she lived in England. Then the return home with her parents in 1990.

Rapidly, she discovered that she had three marks of original sin. For she had never been a “klipgooier” in the revolt of the 1980s (she was both too young and out of the country); she didn’t speak English like a black South African, even less like a township child; and thirdly, most insultingly, when taken to the Karoo by her parents to meet her old and confused gogo, she was told by this lady that she “doesn’t look like us”. Tough, really tough.

But Thuli was saved comprehensively in the FeesMustFall days, when she was determinedly part of the protests.

When a protest turned wild, Thuli took two rubber bullets in her back. Shattered, she spent two weeks at home recovering. By this time, she had been promoted to a leadership position in the movement. Then, mirabile dictu, the New York Times picked up her story, and she became the “New Winnie Mandela”. Thuli was a hero, a phenomenon, a leader. The original sin stuff was gone.

We have noted how she became suspicious of her father’s activities. Generally, father and daughter had a good relationship – one could say that Cat adored her – but this project, called Operation Havoc, was too much for Thuli. She had to keep her knowledge a secret, sure, but she had to do something to stop the emerging disaster. She decided to travel to Shanghai to unearth the web that her father was caught up in, and then to publish a book about it, to kill the revolt off comprehensively. So, Thuli, after dishonestly borrowing money from her mother, heads off to China.

Ian Brand is a golden boy, destined only for the top.

Son of a Transvaal Afrikaner who had moved to the Cape and had then made a truckful of money developing property in the northern areas of Cape Town where the Afrikaner community was settled, after school Ian was drafted into the South African army in its war in Angola. There he won the Honoris Crux for bravery, and returned to Stellenbosch University to study law.

No stopping the young Ian, he graduated cum laude under the legendary Prof AB de Villiers, who certainly didn’t give cum laude degrees away. Then a Mandela Rhodes Scholarship to both Oxford and Cambridge, and back home to a partnership in Brand, Nortier and Cele, a downtown flat in Cape Town and an Alfa Romeo. What could possibly go wrong now?

What indeed. Unfortunately for Ian, two little cancer cells had slipped into his Perfect Profile, and they were to wreak enormous havoc with time.

Firstly, his promising meeting with Grotius de Grootte and co had become known to Cat and Sello, and he was immediately labelled by them as one of the Stellenbosch team, apparently a deadly threat to Cat and Sello and their project; and secondly, Ian had also enrolled in Dr Eliot’s translation class. Knowing no one there, he had assumed that the institution’s reputation for free speech still stood intact, and he began to, very cautiously and politely, express opinions that were not in the Fallist line. Thuli and Jerome, members of the class, were now on the Fallist ramparts outside, and were eager to roast even the most timid of apparent apologists for whiteness, ie Ian. Thus began Ian’s second problem, and also the vital and interesting debate on Van Heerden’s social issue.

Coming independently into both Ian’s and Thuli’s lives is our next character, the beautiful and hugely intelligent Elizabeth Gunther.

Elizabeth is quickly making her way up the staff ladder in a large publishing company, and meets Ian and asks for professional advice. They journey together to Pringle Bay to visit a crabby book designer. On the way there, with Elizabeth driving, Ian makes his move – a few delicate touches to her neck.

The result is startling. Elizabeth slams on the brakes and slews off the road. In the conveniently available gutter, “it was all sex. Shuddering breaths and a shot of cum across the dashboard, over the speedometer’s Perspex.” Hmm. I don’t know whether the “Bad Sex in Fiction Awards” still exist – if they do, Van Heerden is undoubtedly this year’s frontrunner.

But relax, Gentle Reader, for there is more, and better, to cum …

Not for our Elizabeth the secure comforts of a double bed in one’s own home, no sirree. Our Elizabeth likes it risky, and our dear Ian is dragged, certainly willingly, from public toilet to public toilet to copses of public greenery. Wandering passers-by are at first startled, then charmed, as our Ian learns to trade his cum laude law degree for a cum louder ejaculation gasp.

But life is not all genital communication, and Ian and Elizabeth become the second of our debating partners. Again, Ian is fighting above his weight, and again the dialogue is often testy, always interesting. He now has two women antagonists, one black and one white, and both kicking the life out of every position he has believed in over his long life. Our Ian is developing a self-confidence problem, and our dialogue is getting more and more interesting.

Thuli and Elizabeth come together and become friends when Thuli decides to write a book and “the company” gives her Elizabeth as her advisor. They, too, begin interesting dialogue, as they surround Ian in a pincer grip.

There are many other characters on Van Heerden’s wildly spinning roundabout, the most startling of which is Piekenier Leqluerck.

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There are many other characters on Van Heerden’s wildly spinning roundabout, the most startling of which is Piekenier Leqluerck.

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Piekenier was an apartheid era informer, kept deep down by his spymasters. With the change to democracy, he hardly skipped a stride as he adopted the same role for the new black government. By now, he was a plastic surgeon, with a trendy office in a gentrified warehouse in Woodstock. And he does not come alone. Attached to his office is George the Bomber, previously a member of the underground in the blow-it-up business, a Great Dane and Snaar the Sinister, a character who has made entrances in two of Van Heerden’s previous novels. This time, he emerges centre stage, to devastating effect.

Piekenier seeks out a relationship with Ian, and arranges that they sit in adjacent seats on a flight. Unknown to the hapless Ian, Piekenier and his little team are operating with Cat and Sello, underground for No 1, and their many duplicities emerge slowly, one at a time.

As Van Heerden builds up his characters, so also does he hone his writing style. And there are times when this is, simply, magnificent. Four examples are hereunder.

(Page 334:) With the FeesMustFall chaos underway on campus, the tensions in Dr Eliot’s class reach boiling point, particularly between Thuli and Ian. The Good Doctor, in the full lecture hall, abandons his “hear all sides equally” life philosophy and requests Ian to leave, so strident has the mood become.

Ian is thrown. In confusion, his mind casts back to his last military contact in Angola.

He is leading a small team of soldiers, and they have been ambushed twice and are now under withering fire coming from an overwhelming Cuban force. Ian radios in a helicopter to evacuate those of his team still surviving.

In only one page of text, Van Heerden paints an electrifying picture of the arrival of the chopper and the hugely dangerous evacuation. Adjectives are dispensed with, and the simplest of unadorned descriptions light up this hideous event.

Ian is to be the last to board, as he is the commander. While trying to board, John Massie, the trooper immediately in front of Ian, is shot, a bullet tearing through his shoulders. Ian tries to grab him, fails, and is in turn grabbed by others in the team, determined to pull Ian into the chopper, for they are desperate to leave, and believe Massie is anyway done for.

Ian drops back again, to try to rescue Massie again. In the chaos and danger, he stands on Massie’s shoulder. At this stage, Ian’s troop have a hold on him, and he is pulled into the chopper. They swing off in a hail of bullets.

Ian is bereft. The feeling of his foot on John’s shoulder has left him convinced that John was still alive. If he was alive, his fate is undoubtedly to be unimaginably horrible.

This was beautiful writing – gut-wringing, yes, but so plain and so descriptive, so tearing. Fabulous writing. Read it!

A second and very different example.

(Page 140:) Jerome Maarman is also in Ian and Thuli’s class, although his world is entirely different.

A “Coloured”, his mother is a live-in domestic servant to a family of Van der Merwes in South Africa’s north, and he would see little of her. He arrived at UCT on a bank loan of R50 000, secured by a surety from his uncle, who lives in a shack on the other side of the Cape Flats. How the uncle could justify such a surety is a mystery, but he got it, and Jerome is at UCT.

Jerome cannot afford to commute from the afhok his uncle has provided him so far away, so he spends his week under a tarpaulin under a freeway near campus, without a toilet, or water or electricity.

The disruptions caused by FeesMustFall have resulted in the academic year being extended, and Jerome has no money to see out these unexpected days. He approaches Student Loans at the bank as a last, if unlikely, possibility.

In six pages of text, Van Heerden masterfully sets out the bizarre meeting between the “white tannie, come over from the Parow side, I reckon” (says Jerome) and the desperate student.

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In six pages of text, Van Heerden masterfully sets out the bizarre meeting between the “white tannie, come over from the Parow side, I reckon” (says Jerome) and the desperate student.

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It is sardonic writing of an extremely high order, grim in its close-to-the-bone descriptions, and devastating in how it reveals this bank staffer – obviously employed to disqualify every application except the impossible to refuse – crudely and cruelly at her job.

She is not trained in any sort of diplomacy – or restraint. She soars on, dismissing FeesMustFall and its people, questioning Jerome’s choice of studies, describing parliament as a “circus”, becoming delighted when Jerome drops a word of “Capey”, a dialect she believes he should not know as he is from the Northern Cape, and on and on. Her job is to “find him out”, and she is bloody good at it.

Eventually, when one believes that she must have, by now, run out of insults, she moves in with the Big One: “Do you have any, any income?”

Jerome loses it: “I masturbate into a test tube every week!” and he storms out. The great sadness is that this is true, so desperate is he for money.

This, too, is searing writing, all the more challenging because of its veracity. There are people like this Parow tannie, and they very recently held positions like Student Loans. Read it!

There are two more episodes involving Jerome that should be highlighted.

(Page 272:) The first is really the story of, and fate of, his mother, the live-in servant of the Van der Merwes in the Northern Cape.

She is allowed to have Jerome (called “Jeromepie” by the Van der Merwes) in her room in school holidays. And Jerome is there when the Van der Merwe son, who is Jerome’s age, gets sick and is bed-bound. Unusually, Jerome is allowed into the Big House, and this time can play with the bored young Van der Merwe and his great collection of Dinky toys.

Of course, one toy goes missing, and Mrs Van der Merwe, although apparently polite, knows that Jerome has it (“Of course he doesn’t have such toys at home”), but will not say it so crudely. But the atmosphere becomes toxic, and Jerome is relieved to go. How often has this scene worked itself out in the real world?

Years later, Jerome gets an SMS from his Ma. The Van der Merwes have “trew me out satday morning. Shes cross, but I sit in the dust… I sit kaalgat.”

She’s on her way to Cape Town, on her way to her Jeromepie, “because he has to take care of things now”.

Again, Van Heerden’s text is luminous.

Jerome’s terror: “I’ve got nothing, Ma. I’m flat broke. I live on a traffic island… We are the Futsek people, Ma. Ma must turn around…”

In a few pages of chopped language, Van Heerden delivers this scene, and it is utterly heartbreaking. Read it!

(Page 524:) The scene is the Silver Spur in Bellville. Jerome has walked the endless distance from his tarpaulin under the flyover, because he has heard that there may be a waitering job available. And Ian has come in his Alfa, for other purposes, but seeing Jerome, he picks him up and they go into the Spur for coffee.

Ian is now under relentless attack, and somewhere, somehow, he has perceived that in Jerome he could find an ally.

He talks on and on – farm murders, much else.

Jerome becomes irritated. “Can we maybe get the bill?”

Ian can’t stop. “Please, we have so much in common….”

“Like what?”

“Well….”

“Tell me one trouble we share Een…you worry about your shame, and I worry about where I am going to get something to eat tonight. I worry because I have to mail twenty rand to my mother….What do we share then?”

“Here we sit speaking Afrikaans to each other….”

“And that? And that? It’s just a language. It doesn’t help with poverty. Homelessness…”

These few cameos reveal some of Van Heerden’s remarkable writing. The book is a treat, a beautifully written treat. It’s long, but he seldom wastes words. As in the above example, he knows how to come to the point. Read it!

Back to our story.

Thuli has now set off for China, on an adventure that is to change her life forever. What happens? I’m not going to tell you.

And Ian, setting off on an international flight, does a Helen Zille in the airport. Zille set off a tweet in an airport that suggested that some aspects of colonialism could, possibly, merit consideration. For this, her pals threw her into a pit full of howling hyenas.

Ian made a similar mistake in his airport. Irritated by tardy airport staff, he set off a tweet suggesting that many of us are in no hurry about anything except independence. That was the beginning of another life for the young lawyer. What happened? I’m not going to tell you.

And the library? Where and how does that fit in? Again, I’m not going to tell you.

A good book review would, I guess, tell just enough of the book to convince a reader that the book under review is, or is not, of interest to the reader. The review should reveal no more than just enough. Don’t let the book’s secrets out. I have dramatically overstepped this benchmark, and must now bring this note to a conclusion.

There are many strains of fiction, and the one that catches my attention is writing that is grounded in the realities of the world in the space that the writing is set, writing that tells us not only of the characters created, but also of the rough and smooth of a real society in which they have been planted. Dickens is the master of this genre, of course, but many other writers have made major contributions to our understanding of the real world by the author’s insertion of fictional characters into a real backdrop.

And such writing can have immense social benefits, can cause waves of improvements to be later commissioned to ameliorate the described world. Sylvia Nasar, in her splendid book, Grand pursuit, places the beginning of our world of plenty in Dickens’s publication of A Christmas carol in 1843. This work, determinedly formulated by Dickens to win the largest possible readership, came at a time when England was the wealthiest country in the world, and yet, as Burke wrote, “nine Parts in ten of the whole Race of Mankind drudge through life”, even in wealthy England.

Then, dominant economic thinking went with Malthus, England’s first professor of political economy, who postulated that the human population anywhere and everywhere grew faster than the food supply, and this ensured that the average standard of living would always fall. That was determined and unchangeable.

Dickens, Nasar writes, in A Christmas carol sends the Malthusian Scrooge off to have a massive change of heart, and to fill up the Crachit’s Christmas table, in a clear demonstration that economic circumstances are open to human intervention, and for the better.

In this wildly successful book, Dickens created the birth of the idea of the egalitarian society and the welfare state, with education for all children and a basic standard of living for all. These ideas, Nasar writes, began in a novel, this novel.

Van Heerden’s Library is not going to put a chicken in every pot in South Africa, nor does it try to. It aims to warn us that there are computer systems being devised in China that will change our world immensely for the worse, and that we need more debate and better focus on “Whiteness” in South Africa, both its bad side and its good. His writing lifts both issues out of the furnace of intensity they so often find themselves to be in, and his burlesque characters provide such an amusing backdrop to the issues that we keep reading, on and on, unoffended by the testy debate.

(And if we still think that Van Heerden is off the mark with his now five/six-year-old writing about Chinese systems, yesterday’s New York Times ran an article on the urgent threat posed to Western nations by China’s expanding use of technology to control dissent and to “track individuals”. This is the opinion of the head of Britain’s global intelligence gathering agency.)

To have taken such inflammable issues, and to have presented them so inoffensively yet so clearly, is a clear pointer to Van Heerden’s remarkable skills as a writer.

In Library, he plunges headfirst into fiction with social issues to discuss, and succeeds beyond his hopes, I’m sure. He has amused us, frightened us, titillated us and informed us. He has introduced us to remarkable characters and important issues and bewildering deceits. Through all of this, he has kept us reading, glued to his pages.

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That sounds, to me, like he has written a magnificent novel. Which he has. Read it!

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That sounds, to me, like he has written a magnificent novel. Which he has. Read it!

Also read:

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