Umfaan's Heroes

A richly funny and painful story Umfaan’s Heroes is a fantasy and a political novel in spite of itself, with a seasoning of Science Fiction with a unique insight into living under the insane madness of the Apartheid regime in South Africa. Lovers of Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Sharpe, Ursula Le Guin and Franz Kafka will enjoy this book. Aware of his incarnations in past lives, Tom Bloch, 18-year-old army conscript - South African, white, Jewish - in a prison cell, is condemned to death for terrorism. The novel relates Tom’s journey to his cell, how he was befriended by a witch-doctor claiming to be a harvester (of bodies!) from another planet, via his fist fight with his father, his friendship with an Afrikaner boy, experiments with drugs to this gloomy place with the hangman’s noose dangling outside. Just as well that Tom has always regarded life as an interlude between deaths for he soon becomes dangerously involved with the Mandela-like figure of Absolom. And madness, death and insane comedy is the only winner….

Tom grows up in a middle class Jewish household in Johannesburg South Africa in the fifties. The book begins with his painful loss of his foreskin; difficult for both him and the Rabbi, especially when he (the baby!) complains and protests in fluent Serbo-Croat, a language the Rabbi understands. The reason is simple: babies often remember the language they spoke in their previous incarnations, at least for a short while until the new language takes root. Did you think they were making mere bub bub noises? How do you know that's not Ancient Aramaic? There are a few rather special people and dogs who remember their previous lives. Most of them are in asylums of course...or wandering about the townships scavenging for scraps remembering how they defeated the Persians at Marathon.

You can't grow up in pre-liberation South Africa without getting involved in politics unless, of course, you accept Racism. And neither Tom nor his family can accept the absurdity of Apartheid. In a state controlled and monitored by its security police, this is dangerous stuff and Tom's teenage rebellion years naturally result in experiments with drugs and a determined effort, with his Afrikaans best friend Pieter (or Piet as spellcheck has insisted on calling him), Absolom Molapo, a black activist, and above all the witch-doctor Umfaan, fighting  the system with all the real, imaginary and fantastical weapons at their disposal.

When the novel was first published critics were full of praise. 'Fairly waltzes the reader along…the mixture of the mundane and the fantastic is deceptively artless, the prose full of energy and humour and beneath the playfulness there is an undertow of pain…a thought-provoking and entertaining debut.’ - Hilary Mantel, Daily Telegraph. ‘Funny, bright and painfully sad…’ Helen Shaw, Irish Times. ‘Immensely appealing…Umfaan’s Heroes is a winner from cover to cover from an author with an abundance of talent.’ Evelyn Holzhausen Cape Times. ‘Excellent…is this Tom Sharpe territory? No, but there are many rich ironies reminiscent of Sharpe's good, if bitter sweet scenes of farce…. a fine, realistic novel.’ Margaret Forster Sunday Times.

Jon Elkon left South Africa when he was twenty-one and after a year or two living rough has worked variously in pop music, diamonds and timber. He is a poet too. He remains in London, teaching people how not to kill people. And other things. All legal. The sequel to Umfaan’s Heroes is Laszlo’s Millions in which the action moves bizarrely to London - Tom's involvement with BOSS, the Bureau of State Security, takes on another dimension as he is recruited as their UK agent....