Paper short abstract:

We will analyse how Deon Meyer's worldwide success Fever combines science fiction, utopia and dystopia, more contemporary and global genres, if often considered minor, and the South African tradition of the pastoral. Does his take on the plaasroman do away with its national(istic) connotations?

Paper long abstract:

Deon Meyer’s 2017 novel Fever (Koors, 2016) has been acclaimed worldwide in particular for its rather eerie prescience: in a world struck by a pandemic caused by a Coronavirus perhaps transmitted by bats, the novel has, since 2020, been avidly re-read for clues that may have been missed to prevent the world from coming to a sudden standstill. More accustomed to thrillers and crime novels, the author took great care to propose a scientifically credible hypothesis. Moreover, the novel verges on science fiction as the plot revolves around technology and its complex relationship with ecology: a threat to the planet’s equilibrium, which has become a post-apocalyptic dystopia, technology might nevertheless help rebuild a utopian society at the tip of the continent. However, the utopia put forward by the - Afrikaner - protagonist has not been assessed in light of the tradition of pastoral narratives in South Africa, and particularly its Afrikaans avatar, the plaasroman. Yet, the setting, so near the notorious stronghold of Afrikanerdom, Orania, or the characters crossing the country on a pilgrimage to build a New Jerusalem in a post-apocalyptic, and supposedly post-apartheid, South Africa, make the connection hard to miss. We shall therefore analyse the novel’s take on the plaasroman, which although regularly parodied and rewritten, remains associated with the exaltation of a specific white African identity. Ultimately, it will assess whose future seems to emerge from Meyer's novel, a worldwide success, but irreducibly anchored in a genre and a language with strong geographical and political connotations.