Young Blood by Sifiso Mzobe, Cape Town, Kwela, 2010.

In the taxonomy of South African fiction, self-writing is hardly new. We’ve had writing about the horrors and exultations of the inner life in South Africa for so long now that any new novels on the theme drag behind them a legacy hewn from boilerplate and cloth-of-lead. They have many attributes, certainly. But the clang and jangle of interiority can start to wear on one after a while.

By contrast, crime fiction is an edgier, more rakish medium. Breathtaking in technique, captivating in story, very occasionally astonishing in originality, the field of crime fiction has blown fresh air into what can often be a very stuffy room. In a space that is florid with truth-writing and self-narratives of the kind that have populated the scene in the past decade or so, crime fiction possesses a fast-paced inventiveness that is perhaps more in keeping with the national mood.

Sifiso Mzobe, author of Young Blood, is a journalist by trade, and his new novel at times bears the mark of his profession. I do not mean that as a slander, by any means: the journalistic mode lends itself adeptly to the racy pace of a novel like this one. Fiction and journalism are both picture-making forms of art, and perhaps the sense of truth lent by the mimetic representation of society in the novel is a welcome alternative to what often seems like a solipsistic preoccupation with interiority in other South African novels.

Young Blood is the tale of Sipho, a youthful Black male coming to maturity on the streets of Durban’s Umlazi township. Like many teenagers in a culture that worships at the altar of consumerism, Sipho has dreams of wealth and all the delights that accrue to those with money. At this point, the novel treads thematic grounds that are all too familiar. Coming of age is an insistent subtext, and it takes a great deal of effort to beat back the spectre of Holden Caulfield when Sipho declares in the opening pages that “[t]here was absolutely nothing for me in school”. Against the best wishes of his parents, Sipho drops out of school. In a space where the criminal and the respectable jostle at close quarters, he helps out at his father’s workshop, but finds himself being drawn to the “good life” his friend Musa is living. When Musa tells Sipho that the path to easy money is through stealing cars, we watch as he totters precariously before pitching head-first into the world of crime.

The story winds deeper into the criminal world from this point, with Sipho establishing and breaking ties with other characters, and becoming increasingly entangled in the world of car theft, hijacking and drug-trafficking. The other boy-men he associates with share Sipho’s love of fast cars, in a world where aspiration has a lot to do with what one drives. The cars are almost characters in this play of ideas: a “BMW 740i” here, a “BMW 325i” there, and still another “BMW 535i” later. It could easily just be cold journalism, a sign that the author has researched his field thoroughly and methodically. But under Mzobe’s pen the life-enlarging potential of these objects comes alive. For these marginal figures, the talent needed to obtain such cars (by force or cunning) and the skill required to drive them quickly is an affirmation that they too wield some power in society. As with all illusions, occasionally truth arrives to shatter the window: one of Sipho’s associates is killed in a botched hijacking attempt. The somatic unity between Sipho and the cars he interacts with is one of the finer points in the novel’s rendering.

The author has a fine knack for suturing the reader into the sensations of the urban South African township. In an interview with Mike Nicol, Mzobe says: “I have lived in Umlazi all my life. When I decided to write a novel I was unemployed and financial constraints meant I could not move around for research. I decided to use what was in front of me.” We are aware throughout that Mzobe is on intimate terms with the area, and this local knowledge ensures that what we read about is not simply a transposed and transmuted Soweto, but a unique space which the author’s supple prose evokes richly.

It comes as a surprise, then, to find that the characters in this novel are less finely drawn than they might be. Mzobe shadows his subjects closely, but they emerge as cultural proponents rather than individuals acting within a particular cultural milieu. Musa’s rise to prosperity is a facsimile of Tony Montana’s. The Cold Heart gangsters, with their grating voices and Numbers Gang lingo are a case in point: Mzobe comes close to collapsing into a thrall with the group’s idiolect. This is not without reason, given the author’s closeness to his subject material, but it can feel limited in the same way that a tribute band is a limited interpolation of the original act. By failing to draw out individuality from the supporting cast of the novel, Mzobe condemns them to a muted generality.

This may simply be a problem of language. One is often tempted to ask if people really speak the way Mzobe presents them, if people in Umlazi really articulate themselves in almost theatrical English when there isn’t a spectator present. The answer may lie in the author’s admission that Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country is a touchstone for his work. Mzobe’s prose inherits an unfortunate trait from Paton’s work, in that he seems to be trying to convey the cadences and syntaxes of urban Zulu speech in English, with ponderous effects. One senses that an opportunity was missed here: the mixed registers and inventive strains that characterize urban Zulu could have been demonstrated to better effect. Perhaps that is a reflection on the readership at whom the book is aimed.

There is also faint echo of Paton in the juxtaposition of Sipho’s “good” familial authority with the lawlessness into which he is drawn, but one senses that Mzobe is interested in how these contradictions affect those who live under them: what causes Sipho to cede his goodness to the world of crime? How does he return from his plunge into an underworld that isn’t “under” at all, but disturbingly close to home?

In Young Blood, we get a novel that has the potential to slot into a ready-made place on the national bookshelf. We have a certain idea of what a novel like this should be about, and Mzobe adeptly colours in the confident sketch we already have in mind. It is not so much reading as falling into the pages of a rich catalogue of imagination-imbued facts. It is almost as though the novel anticipates its readers’ fear of the unknowable future, and panders to that fear. Because we know the routine, and because Mzobe signals that Sipho may turn back towards the path of legality sooner or later, we steel ourselves for what follows. That the narrative retains its appeal in spite of this says a lot about Mzobe’s writing style. But in its reassuring story arc, there is a sense of recognition that can be dispiriting for the reader who may have wanted it to go beyond the basic assurance that souls will always seek their good in the end. In a text that purports to know everything there is to know about itself, there is little for the reader to do but sit back and be immersed.

Mzobe is certainly an exponent of what James Wood, in his reading of David Foster Wallace, calls “immersion fiction”. His prose is absorptive to a point – one finds oneself rapt and forgetting to breathe as each page turns. The sense of involvement is made more noticeable by Mzobe’s penchant for description. Nothing escapes the voracious drive to provide us with information. Clouds in the sky are not merely clouds but “gun metal clouds”. The bakkie his father is working on off-screen not only has its ailment diagnosed (a misfire) but is described as a “mistiming Ford Courier”. The clouds are pretty, the coughing bakkie is fatuous. These are the rules of the game: detail confers authenticity, and authenticity is of critical importance to a novel like this one.

You may decide for yourself if this is a fault or not: perspective depends on more than just what is immediately apparent to the eye. What is certain is that the deployment of all this detail is a technique which lends itself to film, and I would not be surprised to see a televised or cinematic adaptation of the novel before too long. If there is a problem, it is that such a style of writing is ill-equipped to convey subtleties. It is less about hermeneutic blurring, ellipses and occlusions which the reader is left to speculate on, than it is about getting as much detail as possible on to the page. The scenes are beautifully rendered, all the characters are in place, but all this intensity of image begins to look like a fear of silence, a compulsion to colour in everything rather than letting the images speak for themselves.

The novel works well to disguise the fact that it sometimes speaks with an uncertain voice. One is aware that the slavish adherence to authenticity that tags along with representing subaltern spaces gets in the way of some of the more interesting points of the story. When the novel ended, I was left feeling that it was less interested in telling me about an individual self than it was in offering a bona fide tale of a type of self.

One of the characteristics of a novel like this is that it is hamstrung by its conflicting aims: it is trying to tell us how the world works, while simultaneously attempting to tell us how someone felt about something in that world. It must avoid being mere journalism while simultaneously being called upon to be a social document or commentary on the culture. In the end, you are paying for the sizzle rather than the steak itself. Mzobe’s novel, though, usefully illustrates that if there is friction between the two divergent aims, there are also revealing points of connection. The apathetic, often senseless void against which the current moment balances precariously is articulated in a way which offers a tantalizing glimpse of where South Africa’s writing could, with difficulty, progress forward.

That being said, this may be what grants the book its endearing readability. If it prefers embodying things to gesturing after them, then it is also refreshingly different to the paeans to solipsism that proliferate in the South African literary field.  The story gets beyond the clumsiness of its own medium, and demonstrates the points of connection between the individual narrative and the narrative of society.

The possibility of becoming criminal, of diverging from legality to follow one’s own path, has always held a societal appeal. The material reality of such a way of living is an antidote to the anodyne reality of a regulated life. This may be why a novel like Young Blood is so readable: in its cinematic gloss (even its grittiness gleams) it provides vicarious relief, a step away from the self-deception of conformity in the law-abiding life.

Works Cited
Mzobe, Sifiso, and Mike Nicol. “The Sifiso Mzobe Interview”. Available online at http://crimebeat.bookslive.co.za/blog/2011/07/01/crime-beat-the-sifiso-mzobe-interview
Wood, James. “The Digressionist”. In The New Republic, 9 March 2004.