An idyll with a tragic undertow

In a country where cookbooks, sports biographies and journalists' retellings of crime stories routinely pack the bestseller lists, new South African fiction often fails to attract the attention it deserves.

A prime example is Dominique Botha's immensely accomplished debut, False River, released in August, which is easily one of the best South African novels in recent years and deserves a wide readership.

To call it a "novel" in the strictest sense is perhaps questionable. False River presents itself as a novel - the classification is printed on the book's jacket - but the path to adulthood it describes is clearly Botha's own.

"You have to acknowledge the fact that retrieving a memory is committing a first act of fiction," Botha explained in a recent interview.

The work recounts a rural childhood spent on a farm in the Free State. But if the thought of yet another idyllic-white-childhood-in-Africa bildungsroman leaves you tired, fear not: False River is unlikely to be quite like anything you've read in the genre before.

Botha's first language is Afrikaans, and a version of the book in that language is available as Valsrivier - by some accounts even better. But the author has an astonishing facility in English as well.

The work's initially short, staccato sentences mimic the flitting thought patterns of a child while presenting the reader with hauntingly evocative images. "Ma liked praying even if she did not believe in God," Botha writes. "She said the Dutch words were worn smooth through use and dropped into the circle of held hands like stones into a pond."

The family are liberals who find apartheid repugnant, but this is not a polemical or self-righteous work. Dominique wishes her parents would vote for the Nats and go to the Dutch Reformed Church to spare the Bothas the shame of social alienation from the white community.

The opinions of her father provide some of the funniest points of a work which manages to be both hilarious and poignant in effortless turns. On taxation, she notes: "Pa believed you must give unto Caesar what is due unto Caesar, even if he is a heartless shit."

The journey to adolescence disrupts the rural idyll of life on the farm. Dominique and her brother, Paul, are dispatched to posh boarding schools: "It was the most beautiful place I have ever seen. I disliked it immediately."

Paul is the character at the centre of the book: an individual seemingly born to be immortalised in literature. He is brilliant, handsome and rebellious, and from the outset his light shines with such manic brightness that one suspects it may burn out.

"Paul was crying now," she writes early on, describing the aftermath of a beating for misbehaviour. "In the end he always cried more than me."

In this manner Botha foreshadows the increasingly inevitable tragedy that has left an indelible stamp on the family.

• 'False River", published by Random House Struik, R203 at Exclusive Books