‘Red Dog’ raises red flags but also opens up the past

In June 2019, the UK freelancer George Berridge wrote an unenthusiastic review of Willem Anker’s Red Dog, which two weeks ago was named as one of the 12 books on the long list of the International Booker Prize. He raised questions about possible plagiarism of works by Cormac McCarthy and Samuel Beckett; in December Vrye Weekblad’s books columnist, Deborah Steinmair, asked why nobody had responded in the six months since.

Her article unleashed a storm of retribution. In a rush defence befitting a rugby match, academics phoned to lecture her; the digital comments mostly chastised her for spreading rumour and jeopardising a young writer’s career. In what was more a leaping defence, two fellow authors actually bolstered the case against Anker.

It was a startling spat, since almost nobody dealt with the substance of Berridge’s suggestion, nor did anybody seem to approach Anker himself, who contributed a short letter in a newspaper which some found incomprehensible.

Red Dog is the translation by Michiel Heyns — also nominated for the prize — of Anker’s novel

Buys, which won just about every Afrikaans award on offer, netting him, according to one rough calculation, almost R1m in prize money. Berridge lifted out one paragraph, suggesting there may be more, which bears a near 90% resemblance to a paragraph from McCarthy’s

Blood Meridian. Anker’s apologists say he acknowledged his dues in a remark in the back of the book that readers may come across “the remains of other authors, notably Samuel Beckett and Cormac McCarthy”.

In a follow-up piece on the literary website LitNet, Steinmair pointed out that there was no reference to these authors in the Afrikaans version.

Heyns mounted an angry defence on LitNet but inadvertently poured oil on the fire by admitting that he and Anker had discussed whether his “thefts” from McCarthy would cause trouble with copyright laws.

He seemed to remember that he told Anker he did not think so, wrote Heyns, apparently unable to see that they should also have discussed the possibility of plagiarism. Heyns implied that if the writer, translator or publisher failed to see any crime being committed, there was no crime.

Another author, SJ Naude, chastised Steinmair for making too much of foreign opinion, forgetting that his own awardwinning novel, Die Laaste Spoel, translated as The Last Reel, is based almost entirely in London and Germany and deals with very non-South African issues.

Whether there was plagiarism is obviously a borderline issue — it will depend on the particular definition one chooses to use. But the vehemence of the defence perhaps offers an explanation why Anker is being let off the hook and why any possible plagiarism is being chalked down, in the Afrikaans literary world at least, to those handy paradigms of postmodernism, intertextuality or pastiche.

Buys, as the British historical novelist Antonia Senior wrote of Red Dog in The Times of London, was “a sensational novel” when it appeared in 2014. It is the story of Coenraad de Buys, a white rebel against the Cape colonial administration who ventured into the interior, plundering and massacring his way in as, in effect, one of the first “Voortrekkers”. Except that whereas the latter brought with them ideas of racial purity, Buys enters into multiple relationships with women of various races, producing a progeny that becomes a band ready for extreme violence in their battle for survival.

Evoking the aspirations of the Judge in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Buys becomes an omniscient narrator who sometimes hints he is looking on his own exploits from the reader’s present, an “omniBuys”, also a reference to Molloy of Becket. There are references to Moby Dick and one could point as well to the atmosphere of a Voss or The Tree of Man by the Australian writer of the wild, Patrick White. But Anker writes in a poetical, sometimes mesmerising, style of his own.

All of these writers provide critiques of colonialism to various degrees, but none of them has had the political impact of Buys. Literature has been one way for the Afrikaner conscience to do its work, starting with one of its founders, Eugene Marais, who wrote lovingly if condescendingly about non-white women, and on to the eminence grise of Afrikaans poetry, NP van Wyk Louw, whose seminal epic, Raka, has only black characters.

He and writers of the succeeding generation, the Sestigers, clashed repeatedly with the apartheid authorities; Breyten Breytenbach ended up in jail. But their work often was of uneven quality and sometimes erred in other ways, as in the misogynistic novels of Andre P Brink. It was left to the current crop of Afrikaans writers to produce work of unquestionable world-class quality, all the while taking further the project of opening up the past for Afrikaners, and for that matter other white people too.

The works of Marlene van Niekerk, Dan Sleigh and Etienne van Heerden look beyond the superficialities of apartheid into its deeper causes, in Western colonialism, while a writer like Kleinboer explores his life with a black partner in the incomparable Hierdie Huis (This House). Anker joined both these strands with Buys. One can develop an argument that if there is plagiarism, it is of a piece with the general ethos of colonialism: just like Buys did not hesitate to plunder from and kill fellow victims of colonialism in a generalised anarchy of the bush, Anker thieves from authors who built their reputation and perhaps riches on their appropriations of the sufferings of colonial victims.

In such an argument pastiche of Blood Meridian would be greatly appropriate and perhaps even endorsed by McCarthy. The 19th-century setting of both books was the time of the frontier in the majority of Western colonies, in which native peoples were wiped out or subjugated as lesser people not always deserving to live. It is only in recent decades that the white world has begun to deal with this legacy, in popular movies such as Dances with Wolves

and in novels such as Blood Meridian and Buys/Red Dog.

The vehemence of the apologies for Anker is perhaps rooted in an anxiety that what is seen as an unnecessary fastidiousness over a few ambivalent paragraphs might set back this larger project.

Berridge and Steinmair were just doing their job in raising issues of plagiarism and appropriation, and one should really not drive a bulldozer over the messenger. But when the adjudicators of the International Booker assess Red Dog, they should also take into account the immense contribution Buys

has made to anticolonial discourse in SA. To say that awarding the prize to Red Dog

or even a shortlisting would greatly boost this evolving process, is no reason to do so, but it would not be disproportionate.