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The explosion of crime fiction in contemporary South Africa requires explanation in terms of its relations with actual crime in that country, with crime novels from elsewhere, and with trends in South African literary history. Taking issue with recent criticism which sees in the genre a turning away from historicity and the political, the article argues that the novels of Deon Meyer and Margie Orford display an engagement with major post-apartheid themes, and a politics that is, for the most part, liberal in nature. There is a striking correlation to be drawn between the proposals of South African criminologists and what contemporary crime novelists themselves explore in their fictions. Specifically, both return to the figure of the detective as an antidote to disorder, violence, and uncertainty. This essay interprets the meaning of the post-apartheid crime fiction phenomenon in terms of the novels' capacity to negotiate threat, and to profit from doing so.

Starting from a reading of Damon Galgut's The Good Doctor, this article examines the changing nature of social space in South Africa since 1994 as reflected in recent writing by Galgut, Ivan Vladislavić, Jonny Steinberg, K.S. Duiker and J.M. Coetzee. Adapting Mikael Karlström's distinction between 'dystopian' and 'eutopian' responses to social phenomena, I argue that post-apartheid literature bears witness to the perpetuation of a fundamentally dystopian society. South Africa, by these lights, has seen no significant opening up and making public of space either physically or otherwise. Discussing the urban environment, crime, xenophobia, gender relations and sexuality, the article shows that power remains in the private sphere, with space still constructed in terms of exclusion rather than inclusion.

Age of Iron has received much critical attention; most interpretations of the novel revolve around themes such as trust, the silence of the victim-figures, or the fictional treatment of real, historical events. Derek Attridge, for example, discusses the question of trust and responsibility towards the other represented in the novel by Vercueil and John; Jane Poyner analyses the connection between confession and truth, on the one hand, and the historical situation Mrs Curren lives in, on the other; Michael Neill focuses on the novel's representativeness for the period of 'interregnum' in South Africa. The concept of shame as dramatised in Coetzee's work in general and in this novel in particular has received little attention. The present article is devoted to an analysis of shame in Age of Iron, shame derived from a corrupted sense of community and justice. It will look into the effects shame causes, as dramatised in the person of the protagonist of the novel. Another concern of the following discussion consists in an analysis of the imagery the narrator's discourse creates in order to designate moral wrongs, both individual and social. The novel teems with repulsive images evoked by the frequent use of references to insects or aggressive animals and birds, images that translate the narrator's ample rage against the times, her sense of helplessness and abhorrence of the injustices occurring around her. The last part of the essay offers an interpretation of the narrator's failure to burn herself and thus convert her death into a meaningful event. Rather than regarding her death as salvation facilitated by Vercueil, as Benita Parry suggests, the following reading will consider her death and the struggle preceding it as an impossibility of redemption.