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Deon Meyer’s fifth crime novel, Infanta (2004), appears inherently South African, both as regards a clearly recognisable physical environment and as social, political and moral landscape. However, it also stands in a long international literary tradition of crime and detective fiction. Unlike the majority of earlier Afrikaans crime novels, Meyer’s work relates to the American hard-boiled tradition rather than the British tradition of genteel detective fiction. It is when Meyer’s novel is read in the context of the traditional characteristics of the genre that it emerges in a surprising way how the novel not only attempts an objective description of the South African social and moral condition, but also serves as an implicit judgment of the situation, a judgment from which the reader is not excluded.

Deon Meyer’s post-apocalyptic novel, Fever, opens with Nico Storm, the narrator, and his father being attacked by dogs. Nico is only thirteen years old, but is forced to shoot the dogs to rescue his father. This incident sets the scene for the rest of the novel. It characterises Nico and his father and their relationship. It also informs the reader about the world in which the novel is set. Fever opens a few months after ninety-five percent of the world’s population died as the result of a mysterious virus—one engineered in an attempt to redress ecological imbalances. In this article, the representation of dogs and other canids in Fever is used as a departure point to bring the worldviews of the various characters into dialogue with Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology. It is argued that the different worldviews (and the place accorded to canids in each) have political and ecological implications. Most of the worldviews can be understood in terms of what Morton calls the “agrilogistic loop” because they are based on the assumption that humans can and should manipulate the nonhuman. Two characters’ view of canids are, however, closer to what Morton terms “ecognosis”, because they acknowledge humans’ (and canids’) entanglement with the rest of nature.

Crime fiction has experienced a boom in popularity in South Africa in recent years. While some critics argue over the high- or lowbrow status of the genre, a more fruitful approach may be to consider how fiction about crime addresses particular themes in order to negotiate contested ideas of nation-ness. This article will first assess how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the osmosis between creative non-fiction and crime fiction have laid the foundations for a discourse whereby personal narratives of justice and victimhood are transposed to a level of national significance. Narratives of revenge are a key route by which authors of crime fiction tackle a sense of unfulfilled justice. Violent crimes in Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit, J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and Deon Meyer's Devil's Peak are narrated from differing perspectives, portrayed variously as acts of disproportionate revenge or violently just retribution. In these novels, the characters impart wider significance to their own violence and victimhood, tying themselves to the failures of the TRC and the new nation's supposed inability to deliver justice. In Bitter Fruit, Disgrace, and Margie Oford's Daddy's Girl, sexual violence is portrayed as a weapon to right historic grievances. Contemporary crime fiction both reinforces and challenges popular misconceptions about rape, encouraging audiences to reassess notions regarding the post-colonial state. With familial metaphors for the nation prevalent in post-apartheid South Africa, narratives of intra-familial sexual violence highlight issues surrounding inter-generational responsibility and the recurrence of a violent past.

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.

Literature is an expression of the world in which the writer lives and becomes an eternal renewal. Indeed, fiction and reality are currently being mixed up once again around the global pandemic we are going through. Today's world is experiencing upheavals in daily life due to the COVID 19 virus and even the health crisis since January 2020. This disease has sown disorder within societies and has even fostered prejudices and stereotypes. Such is the case in “The Year of the Lion” by its South African author Deon Meyer. In this communication, we will try to see, on the one hand, how this postapocalyptic and premonitory novel written since 2016, reveals itself to be a place of value judgments and gives rise to preconceived ideas against the characters having to manage extreme situations and make difficult decisions, and on the other hand, to see how the author works to deconstruct these stereotypes by putting the action exclusively in Africa.

Deon Meyer’s post-apocalyptic novel, Fever, opens with Nico Storm, the narrator, and his father being attacked by dogs. Nico is only thirteen years old, but is forced to shoot the dogs to rescue his father. This incident sets the scene for the rest of the novel. It characterises Nico and his father and their relationship. It also informs the reader about the world in which the novel is set. Fever opens a few months after ninety-five percent of the world’s population died as the result of a mysterious virus—one engineered in an attempt to redress ecological imbalances. In this article, the representation of dogs and other canids in Fever is used as a departure point to bring the worldviews of the various characters into dialogue with Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology. It is argued that the different worldviews (and the place accorded to canids in each) have political and ecological implications. Most of the worldviews can be understood in terms of what Morton calls the “agrilogistic loop” because they are based on the assumption that humans can and should manipulate the nonhuman. Two characters’ view of canids are, however, closer to what Morton terms “ecognosis”, because they acknowledge humans’ (and canids’) entanglement with the rest of nature. ment with the rest of nature.

Encountering postapartheid Afrikaans fiction for the first time, particularly the fast-paced crime novels of Deon Meyer, the author finds that the most unexpected element is the new lack of segregation between Afrikaans and English.

After Nelson Mandela took the position of president in 1994, new narratives like Deon Meyer's have become the very essence of the post-colonial changing process that the South Africa is still undergoing. In Dead Before Dying (1999), each character feels differently towards the new, postapartheid regime, and brings a new outlook to modern South African society. As the author portrays it in this novel, South Africa must be understood as an open-ended, creative dialogue of subcultures, of insiders and outsiders, of diverse factions. In this way, as readers, we witness the struggle of a new generation of South Africans in a transitional age in which white, black, and colored men and women try to reconstruct their lives and come to terms with the traumatic past and the abstract notion of who is the self and the Other. They are the voices of a new country and a new narrative.