(#gifted @thebookerprizes) I’m sorry that my first review since the longlist has been announced for the International Prize can’t be more positive, but I’m also glad I read this one first. Surely they can only get better from here on out?

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You might have seen that Anker has been criticised for this novel, described in the English afterword as a ‘homage’ to Cormac McCarthy, while a few reviewers think it’s closer to plagiarism than a homage. Indeed, when I started reading but before I looked up the author, I instantly got Blood Meridian vibes, with the main character Coenraad de Buys bringing to mind the terrifying Judge Holden.

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Red Dog is a grim, brutal, bloody fictional biography of Buys, a real figure from 18th century South Africa, and really just not my cup of tea at all. Buys is described as a ‘polygamist, swindler and big talker’ and that pretty much sums up the novel. It’s told from Buys’ perspective which is tiring after 100 pages never mind 400. Had I not been reading it to review the whole longlist I probably would have DNFd. It’s all hunting and rape and massacres and horses and nipples and murder and torture. In short it’s a LOT, and although it’s clear Anker has done his research and this is likely a fairly accurate account of colonial South Africa, it’s very difficult to plod through and even more difficult to stomach.

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Literature should be challenging, yes, and not sugarcoat or romanticise brutal historic events and usually I have quite a high tolerance for reading about various atrocities. But something about this book just wore me down and the repetition left me feeling restless and even bored at times.

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As a translation, however, it is fairly impressive. Michiel Heyns has translated it from the Afrikaans but kept a lot of the language to really transport the reader to the scene (as much as you might not want to be there). The tone is very cold, which serves well to emphasise the brutality of Buys and his life.

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I think I would have appreciated learning about this particular period of South African history in a non-fiction account, or even just from a different perspective. As it is, I’m very glad to be finished with it and out of Buys’s head.