Die mauer
Max Annas
Publisher: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag
ISBN: 9783499271632
The Stepford Wives gated community living scenario, so common in South Africa that we hardly notice it anymore, must have struck the German writer Max Annas as rich material for intrigue. His instinct was spot on, and a thriller he wrote set in one of these labyrinthine hells recently won the 2017 Deutscher Krimi Preis.
The book is called Die mauer (The wall), and Annas has set up an explosive situation, pursuing a worst-case outcome that unfolds like a Tarantino blood fest before the reader’s incredulous eyes.
It might be a while yet before South African readers can access the book in English – translation and publishing negotiations are under way with a US publishing house – but this is one you want to keep your eyes out for. Because, while South African crime fiction by South African authors has left its unambiguous mark on the world’s crime fiction scene, it’s less usual to see our crime-riddled country from an outsider’s point of view.
Do we care what an outsider thinks? There are probably some for whom this is still important in the everlasting, misguided pursuit of striving to be an exemplary, albeit mythological, outpost of European standards. For the rest, a new angle on things we’ve become used to – like walls and fences – might provide some rather indigestible nuggets of truth. Because, however absurd – almost to the point of comedy – the novel’s cataclysmic denouement might seem on the surface, it is not unimaginable.
Annas has taken some pretty evident elements of the South African reality and mixed them into a breath-stopping brew: a wall, some “intruders”, a tinderbox socio-political milieu and a few overinflated egos that concern themselves almost exclusively with obsessively safeguarding the privilege contained within the wall.
The author – whose previous novel, Die farm, is also set in South Africa, but is thematically far removed from the South African farm novel – lived in East London for seven and a half years.
“I was doing a research project on South African jazz music at the University of Fort Hare,” he said in an interview in Cologne earlier this month, where he was promoting his third novel, Illegal. “The project was focused on the Blue Notes, a band which left the country in 1964 to Europe. But the project is not finished yet.”
Did the concept of the gated community strike him immediately as fertile ground for a racy thriller, or did it fit in helpfully as a metaphor later, once he’d formed an impression of the divisions in South African society?
“No, it took a while before I entered a gated community. At the time, I was developing an idea for a novel set in a mall. Not really satisfied with where it was going, I saw what a fascinating and frightening place such a walled area could be.”
“Frightening” is not, one imagines, how people who live in gated communities see the walls. But, imagine being Moses, the hapless protagonist of Die mauer. He bumbles into the Pines after his car breaks down on the way back from helping a professor pack books into boxes. He has a lunch date with girlfriend Sandi, and his cell phone dies just as his car gives up the ghost. Vaguely recognizing the Pines as a place where he had once worked on a project with a fellow student – who he now hopes might be able to help him – he ventures into forbidden territory, and turns himself instantly into a target for the more pugnacious manifestations of the laagering mentality of the mostly white middle class inhabitants of the gated community.
Not that there are many of them around at noon on a scorching February day, except for dog-walking pensioners and the resident “watch” guys with their aggressive sense of entitlement. Besides Moses, there are a number of other black people inside – the nannies and gardeners and official security people. But, also, two slick thieves, Nozipho and Thembinkosi, who are picking off easily targeted valuables beyond the eyes of the security cameras.
It is Moses, however, who has aroused suspicion by bolting when he is confronted by two aggressive white men. Being a solitary black man in a traditionally white space, Moses knows that his chances of being beaten up before he is able to explain himself are pretty good. But his decision to run tumbles him – and the reader – into a tightly wrought narrative nightmare.
As Moses tries to find the way out of this maze of cul-de-sacs and bland houses with various security people after him, Nozipho and Thembinkosi find themselves in a worrying pickle when they discover they’re robbing the home of criminals who do far worse things than they would ever imagine.
While the author lived here, he read a lot of South African crime fiction. “I read all of it, from June Drummond’s The black unicorn to Roger Smith, who, funnily enough, was easier to get in German translation than in a local bookstore. And the German translations of Deon Meyer’s books were out before the English ones.
“I often found the stories to be too white and too male,” says Annas.
The irony that he is white, male and an outsider is not lost on him. He wonders how his book would be received here.
“What I can’t imagine is whether South African readers would find it interesting that a person from outside writes about the country, or whether that would alienate them. Possibly, my position as a white writer using three black protagonists might generate some opposition. I have read and heard sentences like, ‘White people take away our stories.’ But then, to create the narrative like a novel, I have to make a choice. And for Die mauer, it seemed logical to me to have black protagonists.”
Annas’s novel, at any rate, lands at a historical moment, when walls and separation are the threatening undertone in many political conversations. In South Africa, the walls are still here and getting higher. Their metaphorical potential for disaster has been exploited to the nth degree by Annas, and the effect is riveting.
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