Sifiso Mzobe’s debut novel, Young Blood, scooped this year’s Sunday Times Fiction Award as well as the Herman Charles Bosman Award at the Media24 Books Literary Awards.
The great success that has come to the 32-year-old community newspaper journalist has also seen him being hailed as “a major new talent on the local literary scene”.
He has succeeded in producing a living portrait of young criminals by endowing them with a human face, illustrating that car hijackers and murderers are also capable of love, the exchange of kissing techniques and achievement of erotic highs in the cars they steal.
He has also painted a portrait of Umlazi, KwaZulu-Natal’s car-theft capital, and spared his readers little in his endeavour to illustrate the bloody landscape inhabited by the young hijackers who believe they have nothing to lose.
School sucks, and glamour is there for the taking and the shooting in a world where opportunity by legal means is non-existent. Blood spills, heads crack open, girls are seduced, surrender happens, cars speed, thrills are shared in a fast-moving “crime” novel with a difference.
Mzobe said the book was part crime novel. “I was aiming for a coming-of-age story, which happens to play out in crime. But the crime part comes in trying to put the realness across in the parts when the guy is stealing the car. You have to put in that action. I also wanted it to be a cautionary tale for the young people.”
What raised it above the other contenders for the country’s most prestigious literary award? Possibly its difference lies in the fact that it enters terrain not yet explored.
The Sunday Times fiction award’s judging panel, chaired by Michiel Heyns, praised Mzobe’s “compassion, elegance of writing and intellectual and moral integrity” which made him stand out.
It commended the novel for the manner in which it sketches the social milieu and the way “street slang and thieves’ argot are very convincingly rendered”.
We emerge from his novel with a deeper understanding of the large section of young South Africans left behind because their report cards are studded with Fs and the streets speak of opportunity, cars, Mandrax and Johnny Walker Black.
The lyricism that is surprising considering the head-bashing that is the daily fare of the hijackers is sustained, but the smell of violence lingers. If the judges have chosen it as the best of the batch, which includes Ivan Vladislavic’s Double Negative, which has scooped the UJ and MNet prizes, does this indicate that South African literature is taking a new direction and the crime novel is king?
The Unlikely Secret Agent, a tribute by Ronnie Kasrils, the former Minister of Intelligence, to his late wife, Eleanor, won the Alan Paton Award for non-fiction.
Eleanor was one of Umkhonto we Sizwe’s earliest recruits and one of its first woman operatives.
Kasrils enters the drama as a fellow saboteur. In this book, highly commended in a shout by spy master John le Carre, the young Kasrils is frequently seen holding hands with our heroine, or in a passionate embrace after they have detonated a bomb.
The Unlikely Secret Agent is compelling in its simplistic telling, its dramatised dialogue, although rooted in reality, embraces the elements of a good spy novel; the idealism, the double-crossing, the high stakes and sustained tension.
It is often, not always deliberately, one senses, an amusing book, one that is also, and this is deliberate, extreme and tender.
It reflects sorrow too. Kasrils, for all the “danger” he embodies as a crack operative, is a romanticist, who in this book recalls the song lyrics and the poetry he shared with his beloved, for whom he was clearly grieving when he wrote it.
l Young Blood is published by Kwela; The Unlikely Secret Agent is published by Jacana Media. Both books won R75 000. - Sunday Independent