James McClure, “The Steam Pig” (1971)

A tricky one to interpret, this. Let’s get the basics out of the way: it’s set in a fictional South African town at the height of apartheid; it follows a police investigation of the murder of a young woman; the main characters are an Afrikaner inspector, Kramer, and his Black sergeant, Zondi. The possessive “his” seems particularly appropriate here. Kramer treats Zondi very much as a dogsbody—at least in public.

That’s indicative of what’s at the surface of the book. It’s straightforwardly reflective of its times and its place, and the reflection isn’t pretty. Almost everyone is horrible to everyone else: uncaring, rude, brutal. The casual racial slurs pile up fast, and they seem to be meant. The baleful influence of apartheid legislation is apparent throughout, not as a focal matter but as scenery. It is just matter-of-factly the case that this zone is for whites and this for non-whites and that’s how things are.

All that’s grim enough, and then there’s the descriptive register in which the book is written. The stock of metaphor and simile and reference is relentlessly scatological—piss stains in pants, things that feel warm “like a recently used toilet seat”, and so on.

So on the surface, this book just seems unpleasant, dated, an unhappy artefact of an unhappy time. But here’s the thing: read a little about McClure and you find that he was a campaigner against apartheid, a journalist whose reporting on police violence upset the South African authorities so much that he felt he had to leave the country in 1965 to escape their harassment. Would such a person write a book that unthinkingly, uncritically uses the South African situation as mere interesting backdrop? It seems unlikely. So what is going on here?

A few online sources locate the subversiveness of the story in the fact that Kramer and Zondi are actually quite nice to each other in private. They are, and it’s also true that they are the only two characters who seem to have any kind of soft side. But they are also relentlessly mean to many other people, and not at all above a bit of casual police brutality of their own. So if this is it, it’s thin stuff.

Perhaps, then, it’s more like this: simply showing what’s happening is a way of exposing it, and exposure is all that’s needed to demonstrate the appalling nature of apartheid, and so the book is such a demonstration. That might be it, and that might make sense of the surely deliberate unpleasant register of the description—a subtle bit of editorialising, as it were.

But I wonder if there’s more than that. Essentially, the entire plot of the book, the crime, the victim’s susceptibility, the culprit’s motive, all arise precisely because of apartheid legislation. The victim is trying to “pass” as white, having been arbitrarily declared “coloured”. The culprits kill her because they couldn’t possibly be caught in a compromising position with a non-white woman. It’s a bit like those novels from 1950s Britain that read like adverts for the liberalisation of divorce laws. None of this pointless, horrible stuff would have to happen if the laws weren’t as they were.

That might be overthinking, but it’s the right kind of explanation of how an apparently grim book could in fact be doing the work the author wants. Which is all nice and clever, and well done, but I’m not sure I’ll be rushing to read the rest of the Kramer-Zondi books.