Published 4.27.2010. Europa Editions Press. Translated by Howard Curtis.

Caryl Férey’s grim 2010 novel Zulu, set in modern-day Cape Town, goes well beyond the stuff of mere crime fiction, despite its billing as “World Noir.” In most crime fiction, individual outcomes—justice for the victim(s), redemption for the anti-hero cop(s), an end to the murderous career(s) of the criminal(s)—are what hangs in the balance, but in Zulu what seems to hang in the balance even more so is the fate of an entire nation. The book felt like an education, but I don’t mean that depreciatively, for while the requisites of a murder mystery are present, as in the TV show The Wire the crime fiction plot is enmeshed inside a larger and more dire dramatization of a society’s (post-apartheid South Africa’s) unending train of woes, and the incredible dangers braved by white and black police investigators as they do what they can to fix it. This is all told in a style of uncompromising realism/naturalism—a bleak historical and social context, elaborate description of locales, vivid characterization—which conjures a violent, corrupt, and cynical world that will not appeal to all readers, but one I found edifying.

Cape Town, South Africa and its environs, circa 2007: one of the world’s most beautiful cities, “a little New York by the sea,” as Férey describes it, but also a place of startling contrasts. It has miles of beautiful beaches and luxurious (and conspicuously white) gated communities, scenic parks and mountain lookouts; but venture outside the city, and you find yourself in the “townships” and “Bantustans,” miles of corrugated iron and pasteboard dwellings where the apartheid government herded the black population and paid black vigilante militias to keep the population terrorized and under their thumb, even as organizations like the ANC and Inkatha used their own brutal methods to resist the white oppressor. Now apartheid is gone, but this same outlying areas are under the control not of the local police and elected government but rather various racketeering and drug-dealing Mafias, who have local officials under their pay and savagely kill anyone who gets in their way. Crime in South Africa is generally out of control; it is one of the world’s most dangerous countries, and at times it seems like an honest cop can barely scrape the top off this deluge of gore.

Three such cops who are fighting that good fight are Ali Neuman, the first black head of Cape Town’s Crime Unit and a man with a trauma-filled past (the cover depicts an execution by tire immolation like the one Ali’s brother was the victim of at the hands of Inkatha when Ali was a child), and his two right hands, the uncouth, womanizing divorcee Brian Epkeen, with his estranged ex and college-age son, and the stout, sensitive Dan Fletcher, who has small children and a lovely but ailing wife at home. They are called to investigate the grisly murder of a young woman, Nicole Wiese, who turns out to be the daughter of one of South Africa’s most famous white soccer stars. Wiese was found in the bushes at a botanical garden, her visage almost entirely pulverized by a feral attacker wielding a blunt object. Even more curiously, the state examiner finds her blood to be full of an alarming heretofore unseen drug that (when tested) causes mice to first copulate uncontrollably, then go mad, then kill each other in a raging bloodlust, and then finally die from overdose. Someone on the street is distributing this veritable Murder Crack on the street, but who is it and can they be stopped?

Without unfolding more (readers want more of a plot paraphrase than a summary), I can say that the rest of the book explores the inner workings of the dope-dealing Mafias, the politics and Zulu cultural background of paramilitary groups like Inkatha, and the racial attitudes of the unseated white minority. Férey’s includes a fair amount of expository information giving historical context to the main plot of the novel, and these paragraphs are short, to-the-point, and directly influence the plot; and the plot of this book felt so historically-rooted that I felt a very strong inclination to read up on recent events in South Africa to see how much of the extreme content of Férey’s novel was embellished and how much reflects reality, which says something about how necessary to the book this historical content was. (When you find yourself wanting to know more, then it is not, properly speaking, an info-dump.) This history helps ground the world.

Another element that helps ground the world in Zulu are Férey’s vivid descriptions of places and actions. Here is his description of a township slum:

Corrugated iron, wooden planks, old doors turned upside down, bricks, scrap iron—they built with whatever was around, whatever they could pick up, steal, exchange. The slums seemed to be heaped one on top of the other, the tangled aerials on their roofs engaged in a battle to the death under a leaden sun.

The gorgeous suburb where the Wiese family lives is described like this:

Despite the worries about safety and the high demand for property, Camps Bay was still the flagship suburb of Cape Town, a seaside and residential resort protected by Chapman’s Peak, one of the most beautiful roads in the world, which you now had to pay a toll to use. The only blacks you saw here parked the cars or helped in the kitchens.

Descriptions like these implicitly contrast the social conditions experienced by the black majority and the white minority in South Africa and set up the reader’s expectations for the dramatically different attitudes and lifestyle they will see when Brian Epkeen goes to interview the Wiese family. This is Naturalism (a literary movement that starts in France with Balzac, Flaubert, and Edmund and Jules de Goncourt, which emphasized detailed, complex fictional worlds) par excellence, the kind you can get lost in.

Around the edges of these socially astute descriptions there are also flecks of humor and fascinating encounters which illustrate social truths, such as when Neuman is dealing with the rage and fatherly indignance of white retired soccer player Stewart Wiese, who has just positively identified the lumpen corpse of his daughter:

“Was Nicole . . . was she raped?”

“We don’t know yet. The postmortem will tell us.”

Wiese rose to his full height–he was slightly taller than Neuman. “You ought to know,” he bellowed. “What the hell’s your medical examiner doing?”

“His job,” Neuman replied. “Your daughter had sexual intercourse last night, but there’s nothing to show that she was raped.”

Wiese went red, as if stunned. “I want to see the chief of police,” he said, in a toneless voice. “I want him to deal with this personally.”

“I’m the head of the Crime Unit,” Neuman said, “and that’s precisely what I’m going to do.”

Thrown by this, Wiese hesitated.

The tenseness of this encounter between the racially-clueless white man and the black police investigator who defies his stereotypes is delicious, and Férey has produced multiple equally memorable encounters in the book (memorable as in hard to put out of your mind.) When these tensions burst into ultra violence–as they eventually do, further into the book–the results have likewise just a tinge of comedy to them. They are horrifying, and slightly funny, and therefore all the more horrifying. The violence depicted in Zulu is something rawer and at the same time more subtle than what might be termed caricature or comedic violence. It is nightmarish violence, violence that denies any attempt to make sense of it or extract a moral from it or paint a storybook picture of reality from it. There are some awful people in this book who do awful things, and there’s no niceness about it. The heroes don’t always come away whole or even alive, nor will they necessarily die with dignity.

This is of a piece with Férey’s Realism/Naturalism. and some readers may not take to it for the same exact reasons that Victorian readers initially objected to the realism of Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and the Goncourts: it shows us things that are unpleasant. Poverty is unpleasant. Graphic violence is unpleasant. Racism is unpleasant. The raping, murder, and general neglect in the townships is unpleasant. But these things are real, and Férey’s book doesn’t shy away from showing them in all of their grisly implications. We are shown the victims of brutal gang violence, how police are too overwhelmed to care about missing poor children, how politicians are driven by media and corporate influence from doing the right thing. Zulu is a disturbing but important book because it is so equivocal about these things we don’t want to see. It brings horrifying reality into its fiction even as many readers read fiction to escape from reality’s horrors—this week’s mass shooting in Las Vegas, to offer a current example. To make fiction as horrifying as reality, then, is to doubly insult people who read fiction to get away from those things.

The South Africa depicted in Zulu has some immense problems, and sometimes problems can seem so intractable that people conclude they are not even worth trying to deal with. It’s a mental trap that is easy to fall into. What I took from this uncompromising book is that if we want to change the world we live in, like the investigators depicted in Zulu, we can’t fence ourselves off. We can’t look away.