Dusklands is among the first truly modern novels in English written and published in South Africa. Doris Lessing and Dan Jacobson left their homelands many years ago and have abandoned southern African subject matter; Nadine Gordimer, Alan Paton and others continue to write well and conservatively and are published abroad. Although the Afrikaans-speaking section of this country has always been equated with conservatism, it is the Afrikaans novelists who were the pioneers in the field of the avant-garde novel. Calling themselves "Sestigers," men of the sixties, they modeled their works on the novels of France, Germany, Holland of the previous decade. Again paradoxically, since Afrikaners are the main exponents of white South African nationalism, the Sestigers rarely chose a truly South African background or wrote of matters of immediate South African concern.

In both respects J. M. Coetzee has taken a lead. Dusklands consists of two short novellas...