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The Perspective of the Marginalised
False Bay moves through the lives and deaths of a wide cast of characters whose stories overlap through love, trauma, faith, race, sexuality, apartheid, memory, and the sea. I find the novel’s setup entertaining. How did this idea start and develop as you wrote?
I wrote a screenplay 25 years ago and while the industry loved it, no film was made of it. So, I eventually converted it into a novel, updating it and fleshing out the many characters. I used my own life experience for parts of it and invented the rest. It is not auto fiction though. My life has not been that interesting!
The supernatural elements never feel separate from ordinary life. Ghosts, visions, and saints exist alongside braais, gossip, and family fights. Why was it important for the magical and the mundane to coexist so naturally?
Cape Town is a magical place. The story extends beyond reality to the mystical and I wanted to cover these elements in a way which seemed routed in reality but also encompassed the supernatural. By being very specific about the locations, this reinforces the reality element so I could get away with the magical and still tell a “believable” story.
So many characters carry only fragments of the truth. Were you interested in the idea that no single person can fully narrate collective trauma?
Absolutely. As one of the characters says, “what is truth?” So, I wanted to look at the many sides to a narrative and a variety of worldviews. I also wanted to look at the world from the perspective of the marginalised.
What do you want a reader who has never been to South Africa to take from this book — and what do you hope a South African reader finds that they didn’t expect?
Readers who have never been to South Africa will hopefully get a better perspective of the history of colonialism and apartheid and its effects on South Africa today. Also, the themes are universal regardless of where you live. The LGBTQ element speaks to a community often marginalised as well. Sexism and racism are also huge issues internationally. Locally I hope South Africans recognise the legacy of the past injustices and the marginalisation due to race, sex, sexual orientation, economic status, class and diversity in general. Also, I hope they recognise Cape Town and its magical elements.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | William Dunn | Amazon
False Bay
False Bay is a literary novel with strong elements of magical realism, ghost story, family saga, and social history. Set around Cape Town’s False Bay, it moves through the lives and deaths of a wide cast: Ella, Veronica, Sebastian, Godfrey, Manuel, Mother Angels, Father Innocent, Mary, Liz, and others whose stories overlap through love, trauma, faith, race, sexuality, apartheid, memory, and the sea. The book is not built like a neat plot machine. It feels more like a chorus of voices calling across water, each one adding another piece to a strange, painful, often funny picture of a community marked by beauty and damage.
Dunn lets almost everyone speak, including the dead, the wounded, the guilty, animals, saints, ghosts, and people who have been ignored or pushed to the margins. That choice could have become messy, but mostly in a way that feels true to the book’s world. Life here is not tidy. Grief interrupts jokes. Violence sits beside gossip. A drowning can be tragic and absurd in the same breath. I found the shifts in voice especially effective when they revealed how differently people remember the same wound. No one owns the whole truth. Everyone carries a shard of it.
The writing has a plainspoken sharpness that I appreciated. It can be blunt, even shocking, but it rarely feels careless. Dunn writes about sex, abuse, disability, addiction, racism, queerness, Catholic guilt, and spiritual hunger without polishing the edges too much. That gave the novel force. At times, I did want a little more space to breathe between tragedies, because the book piles pain upon pain. Still, the humor saves it from becoming grim. Veronica’s theatrical wit, the recurring Bloody Marys, the cats, the braais, and the local Cape texture all keep the book alive and human. The genre blend also works well: as literary fiction, it is interested in memory and voice; as magical realism, it lets ghosts and visions feel as ordinary as weather; as a Cape Town social novel, it keeps asking who gets seen, who gets forgiven, and who is left outside.
I would recommend False Bay to readers who like layered, character-driven literary fiction that is strange, candid, and emotionally full. It will especially appeal to people interested in South African stories, queer histories, Catholic imagery, family secrets, and novels where place becomes almost a character of its own. For readers willing to sit with discomfort, contradiction, and dark humor, False Bay offers something memorable: a haunted, salty, bruised novel that keeps listening to the people history usually leaves underwater.
Pages: 204 | ASIN : B0FPN7VT82
