Alert! Remember Ferdi Barnard and Hendrik van den Bergh? You’re permitted to shudder in horror. As BOOK SA readers will be aware, the two apartheid bogey men informed recently-published novels from Jacques Pauw and Alan Elsdon – both of whom openly admit their narratives’ biographical skirtings.
This brings out Sunday Times books editor Tymon Smith’s inner, stick-brandishing critic: instead of two authors grappling to craft creative tales out of recondite and possibly dangerous material, he sees a pair of cop outs:
Fiction and reality are obviously related – we use the experience of one to make sense of the other, twisting material from every-day life into the fantastic. But two new books about the dark side of South Africa’s past raise questions about whether reality is sometimes so fantastic that it just cannot be turned into fiction.
Take the story of Ferdi Barnard, the son of a security policeman who became a gangster and an apartheid assassin – the man who pulled the trigger of the gun that killed David Webster outside his Troyeville home on May Day in 1989. No one knows Barnard’s story better than Jacques Pauw, who has over the course of his long career as a journalist made the subject of apartheid killers and lowlifes his speciality – from his work with Max du Preez at Vrye Weekblad to his documentaries for Special Assignment and his three books of non-fiction: The Heart of the Whore, Into the Heart of Darkness and Dances with Devils.
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