Dystopian thriller is change for author
Crime fiction writer steps up game with a post-apocalyptic thriller
Fever Deon Meyer Anansi Press
It was one of many questions for which novelist Deon Meyer needed a clear answer: How long does gasoline last before it starts to deteriorate?
In a normally functioning world, the question might matter less. But it was of crucial importance to writing Fever, Meyer’s post-apocalyptic thriller about a deadly virus that wipes out 95 per cent of the Earth’s population and leaves the infrastructure that sustains daily living in shambles.
“There are so many things we take for granted,” says Meyer, on the phone from South Africa. “And one of the great challenges of this book was trying to imagine a life without those things.”
Difficult questions kept surfacing in the writing of this 500-page international bestseller about a small colony of survivors in a devastated South Africa. Meyer starts listing them.
“How long will canned food last? How difficult is it to get an electricity generator going again and what are the most vital parts of such a generator? What are the implications when you’ve been dependent on genetically modified seeds?”
The issue of degraded petroleum became critical because some of the book’s most suspenseful chapters involve the vital role played by one humble aircraft and its pilot, an intrepid risk-taker named Hennie Fly. How can his Cessna plane be kept in the air if the fuel is no good? In the process of researching possible solutions, Meyer became an expert on diesel products, which proved to be of great importance to his narrative.
Fever has won accolades from author Stephen King, no stranger to post-apocalyptic fiction, who compared it to his own cult bestseller, The Stand.
Meyer, South Africa’s most popular writer of crime fiction, says he’s “absolutely flattered” by the comparisons, especially given the risk factor involved. After all, Fever was unlike anything he had ever attempted before. And its gestation period was longer than he anticipated.
It was four years ago that he wrote the novel’s provocative opening sentence: “I want to tell you about my father’s murder.” The narrator is 47-year-old Nico, who’s recalling his teenage years when he and his father, Willem, are struggling to survive a deadly virus that’s killed just about everyone. And those first pages crank up the suspense even further when father and son are attacked by feral dogs.
“I wrote those first two or three chapters, and was very keen to continue,” Meyer says. But his agent wanted him to stay with crime fiction while he continued to establish himself in markets outside South Africa. “So she asked me to keep Fever on the back burner and write two more crime novels. I think it was very good advice, but those first chapters remained until three years later when I got back to writing Fever.”
When Fever was published in Britain several months ago, the Times of London didn’t just compare it with Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road, it declared that Fever was more gripping. The novel is a memory piece, as the middle-aged Nico thinks back to his youth and to his father’s struggle to create a new community named Amanzi from the ruins of the past.
But even as Amanzi is welcoming new survivors into its community and slowly evolving into a self-sustaining sanctuary, it is under siege from vicious outside enemies. The novel becomes more than just a survival story; it’s also a blistering saga of war with the men, women and children in this vulnerable settlement determined to preserve their freedom and their future.
One of the novel’s most charismatic characters becomes their saviour. He is a fierce, uncompromising and enigmatic warrior named Dominic, and he also becomes a formidable and sometimes frightening influence in young Nico’s growth to manhood.
So Fever also emerges as a coming-of-age story — although this was not its author’s original intention.
“When I set out to write the novel, I had Nico three years younger than in the final manuscript. Then I realized this was not going to work in terms of the probable span of the book. But when I added three years to his age, I realized I would have to look at his coming of age because these are the big formative years in any human being’s life.”
By doing so, Meyer further enriched the book, bringing depth to Nico’s troubled relationship with his father and heightening the impact on his life of mysterious newcomer Sofia Bergman, whom the smitten teenager decides is the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen.
Fever is likely to absorb readers so much that it may take them a while to realize the book has virtually nothing to say about the racial and ethnic origins of its characters. The uncompromising Dominic, for example, is one of its most compelling creations, but readers will be hard-pressed to determine whether he’s white, black or brown.
“Under such post-apocalyptic conditions, colour wouldn’t matter and culture wouldn’t matter,” Meyer says. He’s 59 and he remembers the South Africa of Apartheid and white rule. So he feels especially invested in the story he tells here.
“In one sense, the book is an exploration of what South Africa would be like if we did not have all the historical baggage we have. A situation like Fever would remove all inequality in any society.
“So in that sense, it was tremendously exciting to write about a South Africa where history and economic equality do not matter. But really, this book could be set in any multi-cultural country in the world — including Canada and the U.S.A.”
Meyer admits he’s “incredibly proud” of Fever, saying it allowed his creativity to take flight beyond the confines of crime fiction.
“It absolutely changed me in terms of what I learned about writing and myself as a writer. This also changes you as a human being when you find you can write at a higher level than you thought you would be able to attain.”