The third chapter considers political and social change in relation to the embattled white middle class. Through a reading of contemporary crime fiction, especially Deon Meyer, Margie Orford, Mike Nicol and Roger Smith, it argues that middle-class culture has bifurcated into liberal and illiberal strands. These strands can be examined in relation to the negotiation of the rule of law: on the one hand the detective fictions of Orford and Meyer seek, ultimately, to affirm the constitutional order; on the other hand, the noir novels of Smith and Nicol encode a cynical stance, one which understands the social contract to have been irrevocably violated. These positions are then considered in relation to shifts within the Democratic Alliance, the political party most invested in white middle-class concerns.

This book shows how South African writing can help us to understand change after apartheid. It begins with the idea that imaginative writing offers productive, sometimes profound, insight into questions of major concern. It aims to shift the attention of literary criticism away from a narrow set of highbrow South African authors and towards the study of a wider range of texts, including popular fiction. And it exemplifies the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach by honing the focus of the study on specific concepts and topics. The object of analysis, at its largest level, is the South African polity as it veered between the hopeful optimism of the ‘Rainbow nation’ under Nelson Mandela, the murderous muddling of Thabo Mbeki and the ‘captured state’ under Jacob Zuma. Questions of a political, economic and sociological cast are central, with changes in the workplace, land reform, indigenous knowledge, corruption, crime and xenophobia providing specific points of focus. The creative literature of the post-apartheid period has a unique and powerful capacity to illuminate these issues and to intervene in our understanding of them.