The Fourth Boy

The Fourth Boy is written in the first person, narrated by young journalist Grant Asher, in white 1980s South Africa. Pitched as a murder mystery, the book is also part-historical novel, part-romance, part-coming-of-age angst, and part-political commentary. This mixed identity adds historical fascination: the true story of 500 Polish refugee orphans who are welcomed into small-town Karoo during the Second World War makes for a bizarre and ironic intersection of fascisms. But the genre multiplicity does come at the cost of narrative tension and momentum. The book centres the white experience of apartheid South Africa – and as a result, the 1980s political violence and repression appear as atmosphere rather than as the lived reality of the black South Africans who were its primary targets and subjects. A historically intriguing novel that slips between the cracks of genres but remains worth reading for those willing to critically engage the structural white gaze.