The Meat Room: Bushveldt thriller guts apartheid’s twilight

The fourth sentence is cliched and the second sentence has a contradiction in the tenses. This is the kind of thing that happens when you have to self publish because publishing houses don’t want to put out a book that depicts a town in Limpopo circa 1990 (when it was still the northern Transvaal) too realistically.

This is only mentioned in case you’re a grammar pedant who would read no further. But these small errors, which are very rare in James Cairns’s debut novel, detract almost not at all from what is a captivating story filled with equal parts humour and the gravity befitting the place and political context in which it plays out.

And there’s no way you can get around the word k_____¹ in a detective thriller set in Louis Trichardt during apartheid’s dying days. Except in the way Cairns does, which is exactly as we’ve put it down, including the footnote. He also uses it sparingly, and only when to not do so would be to lie about the character and speech of some of the racist arseholes who swarmed not only Louis Trichardt, but the whole country at the time.

Hopefully there will be a publisher² who sticks their neck out a bit and chooses not to pretend millions of white South Africans weren’t racist in thought, word, and deed. Hopefully, because The Meat Room is a novel that surpasses anything I’ve read in the South African thriller genre, and some of the Scottish and English variations too. I can’t speak for the Americans. It does so by both following and subverting the formula of stringing events together at breakneck speed. Cairns slows us down at times, yet keeps us fixed on the page by delving into his characters, so that they become people who move around in our head during the periods life forces us to put the pages down. Perhaps this is because they’re so archetypically South African, which makes them easy for us to conjure, but this certainly wouldn’t happen without the insight and fine detail Cairns puts in.

Our protagonist, Michael Detton, is at a disadvantage from the outset as an English speaking whitey from Natal. Not because everyone in the Louis Trichardt police force where he works speaks Afrikaans – obviously Detton can speak the language – but because the Afrikaaners aren’t sure if they hate the English or the Africans more. Certainly they trust him less, as do the blacks, who take that attitude that at least they know where they stand with an Afrikaaner. There are other complications, some of which have resulted in Detton being divorced – of course – and that the sadistic security policeman Arrie van der Vyver is now stepfather to his two young boys. Then there’s the three bodies found hanging in the meat room on a farm out of town, and a situation which rapidly spirals out of control when Detton is sent to investigate. Let’s not forget that this is 1990, so the ANC’s armed wing who use nearby Venda as a base are a constant wildcard.

There’s Colonel Gerrie van As, who is in charge of the puffed up, skaniving, violent yet rather inept police force in the town, and possibly the most intriguing of all the main characters, the black policeman, Colonel Slang Tavhana. Add Detton’s lover, Fulu Matshivandila (remember the Immorality Act) and, towards the end of the book, the jockeying for power accompanied by the release of Nelson Mandela. Together, they are the ingredients for a potent potjie from a writer who knows how to boil a pot.

1 Kaffir. Hate speech. A derogatory term for a black man.

2 Unfortunately there’s only a Kindle edition at the moment, which costs about R200 on Amazon.