This collection contains the novella "A walk in the night" from 1962, together with six short stories from the mid-1960s. It's full-on sixties modernist writing, with echoes of people like Joyce and Steinbeck, very urban and masculine, very direct in its descriptions of violence and squalor (but bizarrely prudish about swearwords). Everything is there to show us how racism perverts and destroys social relations in the Cape Town urban jungle: the white cop Raalte in "A walk in the night" who has been completely corrupted by the power his racial "superiority" gives him and has lost all moral compass; the coloured man Mikey who is so embittered by the hatred he's exposed to that he finds he has killed an inoffensive, weak elderly white man just because he happened to cross his path; the boxer Kenny in "The Gladiators" who "just miss being white" and whose fight with the unapologetically black boxer, The Panther, turns into an allegory of racial hatred — when they meet on equal terms in the ring, Kenny loses, because the force of his contempt just isn't as strong as the force of the black man's defence of his own integrity.

Forceful, stylish but very angry writing. Excellent. ( )