Dan Jacobson Biography

My novels and stories up to and including The Beginners were naturalistic in manner and were written almost entirely about life in South Africa. This is not true of the novels I have written subsequently.

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Dan Jacobson's first two novels, The Trap and A Dance in the Sun, marked him as a writer of considerable ability, with an interest in typically South African "problems." Since then, he has developed rapidly to become one of South Africa's best known and most interesting novelists.

The two early novels are both concerned with the tensions inherent in the extremely close, almost familial, relationships between white employer and black employee, which tend to develop in the particular kind of farm community Jacobson describes. Both embody what might be described as allegorical statements about the South African situation. Jacobson implies that the inhabitants of the country are trapped in their own environment and condemned to perform a ritualistic "dance in the sun." To an outsider this can only appear to be a form of insanity. This vision of South Africa leaves out of account, or, at best, finds irrelevant, the group (English speaking, liberal, white) to which Jacobson himself belongs, and it is, therefore, not surprising that he should have chosen to live and work abroad.

For some years, however, his novels continued to deal with South African subjects. The Evidence of Love tells the story of a black man and a white woman who fall in love and attempt to defy South African law and custom by living together. The novel treats the theme of interracial love in a more relaxed and naturalistic way than is usual in South African fiction, and also highlights aspects of the individual struggle for freedom and the achievement of self-identity. The Price of Diamonds focuses on shady dealings and financial corruption in a small town in South Africa, and reveals Jacobson's quite considerable gift for comedy.

The Beginners, which, together with the collection of stories A Long Way from London, established Jacobson's position as a writer of stature, is an ambitious and substantial novel. The story of three generations of an immigrant Jewish family, it offers a penetrating, subtle, and complex analysis of what it means to be a "demi-European at the foot of Africa" and a "demi-Jew" in the modern world. The novels which follow The Beginners are not concerned with South Africa directly, nor are they naturalistic in manner. But two of the three later novels deal with political tensions and power struggles, and in so doing appear to have deliberate parallels with the contemporary situation in South Africa. Jacobson's continuing interest in South Africa is also reflected in his collection of autobiographical pieces, Time and Time Again, in which he reflects, among other things, on the way in which his perceptions of the country have changed since the days when he could see it only as a place from which he had to escape.

The Rape of Tamar is a witty and sophisticated reconstruction of an episode at the court of the biblical King David, focusing on a power struggle between the aging king and his politically ambitious sons. The Wonder-Worker, set in contemporary London, explores the world of a sensitive and lonely character whose inability to establish meaningful relationships leads inevitably to his complete alienation from the world around him, but, paradoxically, also to his ability to understand people completely. Jacobson's novel, The Confessions of Joseph Baisz, is a brilliantly inventive and deeply disturbing fantasy: the "extraordinary autobiography" of an emotionally stunted individual who discovers very early in his bleak life that he is capable of loving only those people whom he has first betrayed. Set in an imaginary country with a nightmarish but distinctly recognizable resemblance to South Africa, the novel is wholly convincing in its portrayal of a society whose members illustrate what Baisz calls "the iron law: the wider their horizons, the narrower their minds."

Like other contemporary South African novelists, Jacobson has written some excellent short stories. Many of them probe the guilts and fears of white South Africans living in the midst of what they regard as an alien and hostile black culture. Two stories that are among the best things he has done are "The Zulu and the Zeide" and "Beggar My Neighbour." The former contrasts the small-minded meanness of a wealthy Jewish businessman with the unaffected humanity of the black servant he employs to care for his ailing father; while "Beggar My Neighbour" movingly evokes the world of a young white boy forced to come to terms with the cruel realities of a racist society through his chance meeting with two black children. In these stories, as in all his work, Jacobson's special skills are displayed: detailed observation, economic presentation, and a compassionate but objective analysis of the varieties of human behavior.

Jacobson showed his imaginative talent to good advantage in The God-Fearer, a novel that takes place in a sort of alternate reality. Set in an indeterminate period that might well be medieval times, the novel gradually unfolds its secret: in this world, Jews are the culturally dominant group in Western civilization, and the "Christers" are a persecuted minority. It is a challenging vision, deftly executed.