The Children's Day
Translated into Afrikaans as Verkeerdespruit

The Reluctant Passenger
Translated into French as Le Passager Récalcitrant

The Typewriter's Tale

Bodies Politic

Lost Ground

What sets it apart from the start is the quality of the writing: the humour, the wryness and Heyns’s skilful use of the power of understatement.
David Medalie, The Sunday Independent.

It is beautifully and profoundly written. . . It is the best book I have read so far this year.
Janet van Eeden-Harrison, The Natal Witness.

This is one of those novels that has an entirely original feel …
Jane Rosenthal, Mail and Guardian.

… right up there with the best.
Kay-Ann van Rooyen, Fair Lady.

The Children’s Day is ‘n wonderlike, bittersoet boek wat jou sal laat skud van die lag of wrang sal laat glimlag … The Children’s Day is ‘n moet.
Sonja Loots, Rapport.

.. ‘n merkwaardige boek met ’n merkwaardige, ontroerende ontknoping …
Cecile Cilliers, Die Volksblad.

You will not easily come across a local book that recreates history as palatably as The Children’s Day.
Rachelle Greeff, The Cape Times.

Extract from The Children's Day

Having had the protected childhood that was the only kind possible in Verkeerdespruit, I was used to piecing together my understanding of the great world from literature in the broadest sense, that is, almost anything that I could find to read in an unliterary community. Steve, I learnt from old copies of Die Huisgenoot in Mr Welthagen’s barber’s shop where I reluctantly went once a month to have my head scraped with his blunt clipper, was not unique. 'He's a ducktail,' I announced one day as we were standing around outside Steyl's cafe hoping Steve would arrive. 'You can see it from the way he combs his hair.'
'What's a ducktail?' Louis challenged in a truculent tone intended to neutralise the humiliation of having to admit ignorance.
'They're people who drive around on motorbikes and comb their hair like Steve's,' I said, conscious of a certain circularity of definition. This was not lost on Louis. 'Big deal,' he said. 'So what?'
'They live in Johannesburg,' I added, 'and they have Sheilas. The Sheilas are women who smoke.'
Louis wasn't going to be trapped into another admission of ignorance. 'Then where's Steve's Sheila?' he demanded, and to myself I had to concede that Louis had seized the initiative. To him I said 'In Johannesburg, I suppose. Sheilas live on the streets.'
'So? There are streets here, aren't there?' and Louis gesticulated indignantly towards the dusty waste of Voortrekker Street.
I laughed scornfully. 'And what do you think a Sheila would do on Voortrekker Street?'
'Just what she does on the Johannesburg streets, I suppose,' Louis countered. 'A street's a street, isn't it?'
Looking at Voortrekker Street in the meagre light of an unexuberant spring, its one cafe and two shops, its petrol pump and its hotel, its ragged eucalyptus trees, I shook my head. 'No. A street's not a street,' I said, though without quite understanding what it was that I was trying to say. 'No Sheila could live on this street.'

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…entirely convincing, wise and entertaining … a satisfying read on many levels … complex and very funny.
Jane Rosenthal, Mail & Guardian

With the illusion of effortlessness, Heyns develops stories within stories, he depicts postures and positions, and he creates dialogue spiced with authorial attitude in a way that combines to create that curious sense one gets when reading good fiction – of yielding to a world that is complete …

He puts together a portmanteau of narrative sub-genres: political thriller, social satire, courtroom drama, boys’ adventure saga, coming-out story, urban legend, hijack yarn and finally, even a gay love story. That’s quite a feat, if one considers that the overall product is entertaining and engagingly readable
… Heyns’s narrative vivacity also contains a seriously drawn and detailed plan of the social topography of post-apartheid South Africa’
Leon de Kock, Sunday Times

‘… a joy to read …[Heyns] has done something extraordinary with the new novel … [he has] dared to look at our South African situation with … a fair measure of humour and irony ... What endears the reader to the characters in Heyns’s writing are the finely-honed personality descriptions … the details of feature, speech and behaviour are keenly observed, to the point of excruciating reality and often very naughty humour… Heyns has woven facts, fiction, urban legend, domestic concerns, academic argument and wicked observation into a sensual story of discovery – again similar to his first novel but teetering at times on the edge of Tom Sharpe lunacy … Heyns is intelligent, hugely entertaining, and writes fabulously.’
Alan Swerdlow and Anne Williams, Bookshelf, SAfm Radio

‘… a literate comedy about the kind of stuff that should be taken very seriously’
William Pretorius, Bookshelf, Safm Radio

Not many books get you to laugh from page one till … well… forever. But THE RELUCTANT PASSENGER did this for me. Don’t be fooled by this book’s being local, it truly is a universal novel. And could make an excellent movie … Any takers?’
Fakazile Myoza

‘No sacred cows are spared: everything is fair game to the witty insight and lively humour of Mr Heyns. The conversational style works well, resulting in an informal, easy-to-read, laugh-aloud book that will have the person next to you asking to borrow it as soon as you lay it to rest. More please, Mr Heyns!’ -
Tess Fairweather, Wellread reviews from Fairlady Book Choice January 2004

Michiel Heyns’s highly successful and acclaimed first novel THE CHILDREN’S DAY was published in 2002. His second, THE RELUCTANT PASSENGER, shares with its predecessor Heyns’s gift for comedy and his concern with identity and its formation in the South African context … the new novel is a rollicking tale of lavish and exuberant energies … It is a satire, a zany comedy, a whodunit of sorts, and a tongue-in-cheek account of sexual emancipation and self-discovery. At its most serious, it explores aspects of the struggle for power during the period of political transition in South Africa, problems of selfhood (especially the tension between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ in the making of identity), and questions relating to ecology and conservation … THE RELUCTANT PASSENGER is a whirligig of a novel, fast and funny and gleefully irreverent.’
David Medalie, Sunday Independent

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Extracts from The Reluctant Passenger

I’m fond of reading, but sometimes find it difficult to concentrate on very long books. My friend Gerhard says my attention span is adjusted to the sonnet rather than to the nineteenth-century novel, but I don’t seem to find poetry very interesting either: there’s such a lot of unassimilated emotion around for so little reason, as far as I can see. Gerhard says the point of the sonnet is exactly that it tidies up the emotion, but I’m not sure that uncontrollable passion succumbs that easily to a few quatrains and a rhyming couplet. I once saw a man transporting his Rottweiler in a shopping trolley through a No Dogs Allowed area: the beast was clearly well trained, and stayed put, but you could see that all it really wanted to do was chew the wheels off all the trolleys in the universe. That’s the sonnet.

It was becoming evident that even the most uneventful existence is shaped by events outside itself, unless you can contrive to live in one of those fortunate countries more boring as a whole than as the sum of the boredoms of its citizens, and known mainly for scenery and dairy produce. And even then, history has it surprises, as witness the experience of a friend of my father’s in the nineteen-seventies. Intent for reasons of his own on retiring to the spot on earth least likely to be disturbed by event or catastrophe or debt collector, he argued sensibly that it would have to be a remote, under-populated island, preferably under British dominion to guarantee the peace and the plumbing. Acting on this calculation, he arrived on the Falkland Islands just weeks before the Argentineans seized it. He was one of the few civilian casualties, shot by a female British sergeant while in the act of indecently exposing himself. There was an inquiry into the incident, and the sergeant was fully exonerated on the grounds that she thought that he was reaching for a concealed weapon.
This seems to suggest that even the stragglers, the deserters and the flops end up in the passenger compartment of the Juggernaut of history – or in our case, perhaps more accurately, the minibus taxi of history: over-crowded, hospitable, unroadworthy, unlicensed and completely unpredictable as to destination. So the year following the Election of 1994 affected me as it affected all South Africans, if not yet materially, then in a gradual and sometimes abrupt change of perspective, a sense of moving very fast in an unspecified direction, with a novice driver not necessarily elected for his driving abilities. The Government of National Unity was a bit like a crowd of passengers trying to agree on a route when they all had different destinations in mind, National Unity being about as precise a designation as Utopia or Shangri-La. At times it seemed as if one half of the country would continue to drive on the left-hand side of the road, and the other half would switch to the right.

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.. a hugely refreshing South African novel … Heyns has a knack for building clear, expressive prose like a watchmaker fitting together the workings of a timepiece.
Gareth Pike, Sunday Times.

… Heyns … is an extraordinary wordsmith who delights in the potential of the English language’s variety and for whom every sentence presents an exercise in balance.
Heyns’s first novel, The Children’s Day, was impressive for its poignant lyricism; by dramatic contrast, his second novel, The Reluctant Passenger, was an acerbic romp. In The Typewriter’s Tale he has fashioned an elegant combination of these apparently divergent styles.
Karen Scherzinger, The Sunday Independent.

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Extract from The Typewriter’s Tale

The James family arrived in August, pleading exhaustion from their travels, but otherwise more cheerful than Frieda had yet seen them as a family. They brought with them their daughter Margaret Mary, known as Peggy, and their son Henry, known as Harry. Frieda thought that Peggy and Harry suggested a child-like jollity and chumminess altogether absent in the bearers of these names, and preferred to refer to them as Miss James and Mr Harry respectively.
The son had inherited all his father's confidence with little of his sensitivity or intelligence. He was a successful man of affairs, and treated his uncle with the condescension of a young man consciously more capable of dealing with life than an elderly bachelor who spent his time writing books that nobody read. Frieda guessed that he took his tone from the family dinner table, where the impracticality of Uncle Henry would be a frequent subject of good-humoured head-shaking. There was, in the way the young man settled into Lamb House and its amenities, something assessing and critical, as if he were already taking possession, it being presumably a made-out case that as eldest off-spring of Mr James’s eldest brother he would in the natural course of things inherit Lamb House. He irritated George Gammon by proposing improvements to the garden, which the gardener dealt with by affecting not to understand ‘American’; he infuriated Max by pretending to throw sticks for him to retrieve and then producing the stick from behind his back after the dog had dashed off into the empty distance yapping excitedly. He was, as a man of affairs, elaborately interested in his uncle's system of dictation, and asked if he could be present at the sessions in the Garden Room. Mr James, who in the past had treated the Garden Room as an inviolable sanctuary from even the most favoured guests, found it difficult to refuse his brother's family anything, and reluctantly agreed. Harry assured his uncle that he would not be an obtrusive presence, but as he was a rather large young man, and blessed with the family catarrh, he blocked the path of Mr James's circumambulations and sounded like a marine mammal in distress. This caused Mr James's dictation to be even less fluent than usual, more prone to long pauses and revisions.
Apart from this literal invasion of his sanctuary, Mr James had to bear with any number of other calls on his time. A bad headache on Mrs James’s part, for instance, to which she was much prone, would necessitate the offices of Dr Skinner, the local physician; or an enquiry on Mr Harry’s part as to the guest facilities of the golf club would impel his courteous uncle to accompany him there in order to introduce him. And whereas Harry’s golf was conceivably, unlike his mother’s headache, a matter that could be deferred to the afternoon, the young man’s manner did not provide for that possibility. All the minor inconveniences occasioned by his own consideration Mr James revelled in even while he groaned at them; indeed, the more he groaned at them the more he revelled in them, as proof that he could, in refutation of his family’s estimate of him, be of use.
Miss James took up less space than her brother, or did so less aggressively: her presence suffused rather than asserted itself, but was difficult to ignore, like a slight but damp draught. She was pale and serious, prone to nervous exhaustion, the subject of endless solicitude on the part of her parents and ill-concealed impatience on the part of her brother; this in spite of being alleged to have benefited greatly from the ministrations of Mrs Newman, the mental curist.

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Bodies Politic Jonathan Ball, 2008     Winner of the 2009 Herman Charles Bosman Prize for English Fiction      Shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Award 2009, the M-Net Prize for English Fiction and the Johannesburg University Literary Prize for English Fiction.

...Compelling and at times very moving, this is a daring novel, in which Michiel Heyns takes a series of literary risks. ... Bodies Politic resonates on a number of levels: on an intellectual level as a meditation on perspective in history; on a historical-political  level as a study of the relationship between activism and family;on an emotional level as a reflection on love, guilt, loyalty and the difficulty to truly forgive. It deserves to resonate at the bookshop sales counter .
Anthony Egan, Mail and Guardian

Michiel Heyns's fourth novel, Bodies Politic, should be taken up as required reading in creative writing courses because it shows the economies of novelistic art in a way that is clear, instructive and a pleasure to read. ...
There are several important lessons  for writers in the implicit substrate of this excellent, hugely readable novel.
Leon de Kock, Sunday Times

Bodies Politic  is a fictional feast.
Karina Magdalena Szczurek, Sunday Indpendent

Extract from Bodies Politic

Sunday 8 April 1928

Christabel says Wapping is no place for a Pankhurst. I reply that the Pankhursts have always identified with the poor and the downtrodden. She says identifying is one thing, living in the slums another.
   ‘Leave that to Sylvia,’ she says. ‘She likes dinginess and squalor. You’ve always wanted beautiful things around you.’ She looks critically at the wallpaper, which is indeed of an ugliness to distress the soul, a floral pattern wanly aspiring to cheerfulness and arriving only at vulgarity.
   ‘I did change the carpet,’ I venture. ‘I thought it might discourage the wallpaper.’
   ‘I’m not sure that a grey carpet is an improvement, Mother. What looks elegantly understated in Belgravia merely looks gloomy in Wapping.’ She puts down the little dog she has been nursing on her lap. ‘I hope little Flora will cheer things up for you.’
   ‘I am sure she will,’ I say, though in truth I think the little creature is itself too despondent to inspire cheer in others. ‘It is very thoughtful of you. I only hope I shall be able to give her the attention she requires.’
   ‘Oh, she doesn’t require attention, Mother. Just being around you is all she asks.’
   I want to say that being around me hardly seems to exhilarate Flora. But Christabel is not really thinking about the dog: she is inspecting the room as if she suspected it of harbouring rats. ‘It’s not as if you have to live here, you know,’ she says over her shoulder, too loudly; I would not want Mrs Chipperfield to hear. ‘Any number of people would be only too honoured to have you.’
   Any number of people – among whom Christabel is not to be numbered. ‘I know, darling, but I am tired of living in other people’s houses.’
   ‘You know you hate small rooms.’
   ‘Yes, I do, but at least I am paying for it and it is mine. As long as I have my own desk where I can work, I feel comfortable. And Nellie Hall has been an admirable secretary.’
   ‘Nellie Hall can be an admirable secretary quite as much in Kensington as in Wapping.’
   She walks to the little window, parts the flimsy curtains, and peers into the street. Her vivid colouring and beautifully cut frock make the threadbare room seem even drearier, the attempts at decoration more tawdry. She turns again, runs her finger along the mantelpiece and inspects it. There is an ornament of sorts, a shepherdess or some such bucolic fancy, on the mantelpiece. Christabel chucks it under the chin and it falls over. She leaves the figurine sprawling inelegantly, and opens the door leading into the adjoining bedroom, then quickly closes it, as if to prevent some noisome smell from escaping. ‘It’s hideous,’ she says, with a shudder. ‘You could get something nice in Kensington or even near me in Hampstead for not much more, you know, if you asked the right people.’
   ‘But I do not want to ask people, Christabel. It is too demeaning. And Mrs Chipperfield is very attentive, when her other duties allow.’
   ‘I’m sure she is, Mother, but with all due respect, Emmeline Pankhurst deserves better than to live on the Ratcliffe Highway and be tended by a butcher’s wife during intervals between disembowelling pigs.’
   ‘Mr Chipperfield is a barber, dear, not a butcher. And I do not see how I can aspire to represent a working-class district in Parliament when I shy away from living in one.’

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Lost Ground