Street Blues author Andrew Brown knows South Africa’s system of law and order inside and out. As a reservist policeman, he confronts the order, or lack of it, in our society in real time; and as an advocate, writer and thinker, he is obliged to wrestle with our evolving laws, probing their soft spots, testing their conclusions, as a matter of course. It must be second nature to him.
Brown is the perfect person to give a book like Chris Marnewick’s Shepherds and Butchers – which evolves around the concept of justice and its intersection with capital punishment – for review. Marnewick’s courtroom drama is a novel, but contains the true-life stories of men who were condemned to execution before South Africa did away with the death penalty. Here are Brown’s comments, which are not without mild criticism, but which ultimately deliver a solid carrot as verdict:
Human beings can be differentiated along many different philosophical lines: one obvious example is between those who believe in the existence of a god (or who believe that the existence of such a god may reasonably be debated) and those who do not (and know that to enter into such a debate is futile, as one cannot square rationality and faith up against each other and expect a satisfying outcome).
The distinction is as uncompromising as that between fact and fiction. And it is the integrity of precisely this literary and ethical distinction (between the perception of truth and the presentation of fiction in writing) that is ultimately challenged in Chris Marnewick’s work Shepherds & Butchers. The book treads cautiously along another equally fundamental fracture line that snakes across our society: that between those who support judicial reliance on the death sentence as the ultimate available penalty (or at least believe that the use of the death sentence is a matter for reasonable debate) and those who eschew any reliance on statutory killing as a form of punishment (and who know that any such debate is doomed to expire in a morass of emotive anecdotes). But the thrill of the work as a whole is not in the gory descriptions of crime and punishment, nor in the poignant debate between cause and effect, but in the disturbing emotive monotone that characterises the detailed presentation of the facts that underlie the debate. It is this presentation that so blurs the boundary between fact and fiction and leaves one ultimately unsettled and slightly insecure.
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