Spud Part 2 :: Safe House

The Kwazulu-Natal Midlands is where John van de Ruit’s Spud novels are set. The “Kwazulu” part, however, was absent when the events in the books took place. Nevertheless, van de Ruit conceived a profoundly South African setting for his upmarket boys boarding school. He took a lesson from the old adage that “truth is stranger fiction” but names were changed to obscure the identity of the people and places involved.

Van de Ruit’s Spud novels are a South African publishing phenomenon. Despite our demographic penchant for not buying fiction, heads have popped up, ears are pricked, and hands are digging into pockets. Penguin has swept modesty aside and the first instalment’s cover now heralds the fact that not 60 000, not 70 000, but over 80 000 copies have been sold. Their logic is implicit. If Spud is flying off the shelves, you should buy it too.

True, the Spud novels do have a lot going for them. Moreover, the beauty of their formula lies in its simplicity. Van de Ruit takes the familiar framework of school diary and inserts local content. For South African readers bearing the yolk of a private boarding school background, the experience is akin to watching a True Hollywood Story of your adolescence. For the great unwashed, it’s a window onto the codes and rites of a Masonic fraternity.

In spite of his nickname, the central character of the books has enormous appeal. A stranger in a strange land, Spud has entered an upper-class enclave on the back of a middle-class upbringing. The world filtered through his diary is engaging and his naivety (as the publisher puts it) is “wickedly funny.” It’s an easy read and the pages turn quickly. To top it off, van de Ruit has done an exemplary job of promoting himself and mobilising South Africa’s book-selling community.

Nevertheless, there is a bigger picture to the success of Spud and its sequel. What really sets them apart from other South African novels set in the 90s is the way they interrogate South Africa’s wobbly transition to democracy. In short, the “interrogation” part is absent. Spud’s boarding school diaries marginalize the realities of his bipolar country. Despite a handful of nuggets that provide social and political context, Spud’s world renders the outside one virtually inconsequential.

While Spud shows adequate disapproval for his family’s old-school take on South Africa, it is the ins and outs of his immediate surroundings that really count. As such, Spud’s diaries reflect an adolescent experience of the old South Africa where politics hover on the periphery of the playground. He’s a kid with nothing to feel guilty about. In fact, for many book-buying South Africans in their thirties, Spud may very well be the first South African novel that legitimises their Apartheid experience. Could this be its best-selling ingredient?

► Spud Part 1 :: Apple of the Earth

Spud Part 1 :: Apple of the Earth

Way back in the 1440s, the word “spud” described a digging instrument used to inter the seedling of a plant that yielded a starchy tuber. By 1845, the word was used to describe the starchy tuber itself. And so began a word’s etymological journey through the mysteries of language, at least until a meddlesome polyglot by the name of Mario Pei came along. Author of The Story of Language (1949), Pei attributed the origin of the word “spud” to the acronym of a league of potato-fearing Englishmen called “The Society for the Prevention of Unwholesome Diet.”

Although linguists sniggered and pointed fingers, Pei’s assertion was founded on a subterranean history of British potato suspicion. It started with the concern among Scottish clerics in the Seventeenth Century that potatoes weren’t mentioned in the Bible. When the first Great Irish Famine (1740-1741) saw infected potato crops decimate the population of Scotland’s neighbour, the Holy Order had a field day. To top things off, the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (published in Edinburgh in 1768) referred to the potato as a “demoralizing esculent.”

Things settled down and potatoes lay dormant in the Scottish psyche until Spud returned in the form of a bespectacled and emaciated heroine addict slinging brown slime across the breakfast table. It was 1996 and the film was Trainspotting. Democratic South Africa was two. Ten years later a South African would write a novel entitled Spud. The book would tell the story of a boy in a boarding school in South Africa in 1990.

►  Spud Part 2 :: Safe House