Losing the Plot: Crime, reality and fiction in postapartheid South African writing

by Leon De Kock

In Losing the Plot, well-known scholar and writer Leon de Kock offers a lively and wide-ranging analysis of postapartheid South African writing which, he contends, has morphed into a far more flexible and multifaceted entity than its predecessor. If postapartheid literature s founding moment was the transition to democracy, writing over the ensuing years has viewed the Mandelan project with increasing doubt. Instead, authors from all quarters are seen to be reporting, in different ways and from divergent points of view, on what is perceived to be a pathological public sphere in which the plot the mapping and making of social betterment appears to have been lost. The compulsion to forensically detect the actual causes of such loss of direction has resulted in the prominence of creative nonfiction. A significant adjunct in the rise of this is the new media, which sets up a wounded space within which a cult of commiseration compulsively and repeatedly plays out the facts of the day on people s screens; this, De Kock argues, is reproduced in much postapartheid writing. And, although fictional forms persist in genres such as crime fiction, with their tendency to overplot, more serious fiction underplots, yielding to the imprint of real conditions to determine the narrative construction."

276 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2016

About the author

Leon de Kock was born in Pretoria, South Africa, on Friday the 13th, October 1972, the sixth child of Pierre and Sally de Kock.
Although life seemed boring on the surface, Leon lived an adventurous young life through reading. Everything went, he started off innocently with Enid Blighton of Famous Five fame, rolled through the other greats of the day, devoured Agatha Christie and then got sucked into the darker, more intense novels of Stephen King and Dean R. Koontz and the likes. Currently his reading includes a lot more of the fantasy novels of authors such as Rowling, Pratchett and others.

His story telling began at a young age, by high school he was telling full-length stories through epic poems, some of which would be incorporated into a book and published many, many years later.

After completing school in 1990 Leon enrolled for an apprenticeship with the South African department of Post and Telecommunications. After qualifying as a technician he stayed in that job until 1997, when he moved to work in the field of information technology. During those years he played bass guitar in a variety of heavy metal bands, where he was also responsible for most of the lyrics, and managed to get two of his poems published in a magazine.
The editor of the magazine said of his first poem it was 'Dead in the Marketplace'. It didn't stop said editor from publishing the poem though.
By 2001 Leon was working as an IT technician on a major coal mine in the Mpumulanga province of South Africa. It was around this time that he started work on the epic apocalyptic novel, Hordes.
By 2002 the bright lights of his hometown of Pretoria were calling, and he moved back, with no job and no clear course of the future. He found himself working as an estate agent, then moved into architecture, working as a draughtsman.
He kept up work on Hordes, and also wrote a second novel, the fantasy horror Dream World. A six month hiatus from working life, caused by a broken tibia and fibula from taking a tumble off his dualsport motorbike while riding off-road in December of 2009 helped him to complete a lot of his unfinished writing.
Both Hordes and Dream World were Indie published on Amazon Kindle in May 2012. This was followed in June of the same year by the fantasy Story of Enchantment, a novel written through 250 poems, most of them epics, forming one continuous story.
Dream School, the sequel to Dream World, followed in 2014.
In 2015 came the horror Serenity, to be followed in 2016 by another apocalyptic, Sniffer.
The companion book to Dream World and Dream School, titled Guide to Dreaming, was published in January 2018. Also in January 2018 came the collection of short stories, Night is for Nightmares.
The first book of the fantasy Vespula series, Rituals, was released in September 2019, and was followed in by the second novel in the series, Insanity.
In February of 2023 his collection of poems, mostly epic tales, was published under the title Riotous Rhymes.

Leon currently lives in the city of Kempton Park, in the province of Gauteng, South Africa, where he continues life as a novelist and architectural draughtsman.
Never far from nature, he has close ties to the Gauteng and Northern Regions Bat Interest Group as their membership secretory. He holds a membership with the Exploration Society of South Africa and the Speleological Exploration Society.
In 2013 he was involved in a National Geographic expedition to retrieve hominid fossils from the Rising Star cave formation, working as a safety caver in support of the scientists.
In 2014 he was involved in the Gobolo expedition to Swaziland to help explore and map the Gobolo Cave formation, one of earth's rare granite cave formations.
Although his healthy sense of self-preservation has kept him from taking the plunge over the 50 meter precipice into the cave known as Armageddon, he was part of the team that first discovered and explored what would turn out to be one of the largest, deepe

Reviews

[Allyson · Rating 2 out of 5]

This work is not really aimed at an international reader. It is very much focused on a socio-historico-politico reading of certain works of post-apartheid South African literature. This is fairly complex for a non-South African and not an easy access read. The book, I consider to be strictly academic, one that will be employed by local South African academics or others when writing articles or books on this period in SA literature. I have a problem with academic jargon and style when it creates an opacity of argument and while Professor de Kock does attempt to keep this to a minimum, there is something arid and stilted about the style. This might be considered objective, but it also fails to hold the reader's attention and the book becomes a slog to the finish. I am also amused about the fact that the word cronyism is employed in relation to the political corruption and members of government involved in such indictable behaviour. However, the word cronyism can equally be applied to the academic back scratching that appears in this book. A small pool of South African academics are cited and, for those in the know, this is most definitely a form of ego stroking and it aggravates. I felt that the book was also somewhat lacking in consist format and would have much preferred if there had been more relation of post-apartheid literature to international and African literature. Just situating a work in the historical is not really sufficient if it is not related to the global. Why is this literature important? Why would it have an impact on readers outside of South Africa? What are the merits of the works for future generations or current young readers? An engagement with this seemed lacking and a detraction. I also find that the conservative reaction towards genre fiction that still seems prevalent amongst South African academics problematic. It seems reactionary, narrow and not in line with current international scholarship trends. Anyway, where do a lot of our literary canon writers originate if not in the genre fiction of the times in which they wrote such as Ann Radcliffe, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Braddon, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Machen, etc.

This is not a book to choose to read if you are unaware of South African history, politics and literature or want an easy and light read.