Has writing always been a part of your life?

Reading has, writing just kind of followed. 

What do you love most about writing?

You can be whoever you want to be. You can create characters that have all your worst characteristics, who are rude and obnoxious and say and think the things you shouldn’t, and get away with it!

You’re currently at medical school. How do you juggle becoming a doctor with being a writer? How do you fit it all in?

It’s all just an extension of each other, I think. A lot of medicine is about people, human beings, fighting to survive and trying to make or find meaning and all that philosophical stuff. Writing is just a record of all that, I think. 

Was there a seed or a specific incident that got you started writingCoconut?

Ag, yes and no. It was something that I thought a lot about at the time (while I was in high school) but then again I thought about many things in high school (the length of my skirt, boys, my Science homework, boys, matric dance dresses, boys) and I didn’t write about them, so I don’t know. 

This novel has had plenty of praise from its publisher, and has apparently been a hit with ‘younger’ readers. For me, though, it was a slow starter. Early in the story, for example, the dialogue was horribly formal. “Morning Frank”, “Hello, Daniel” – teenage boys speaking to each other on a school bus like businessmen in stilted suits. With such stylistic tics, I was skeptical about how the narrative was going to pan out. But things did get more exciting for the reader, and for Daniel Fox.

Daniel Fox is a dead boy. Even when he was alive, things were tough: he lived with his mom, and constantly had to fend off his nemesis, the aptly-named school bully, Levi D’Arc. (I had some fun toying with the anagram.)

After a dodgy encounter at the museum, Daniel is hit by a truck (yeah!), and he comes to pretty messed up in an underworld waiting room, where he must prepare to be rated. In this strange, segregated environment in which he will come to live, ostensibly the most noble city of Arison, capital of the underworld, each new arrival is evaluated by number, depending on how his previous life has been lived. You stick your head in an ordinary cardboard box, and whoa! your memories are read, and assessed. (Keep that in mind if you check some old carton lying around at the back of the supermarket. Careful. The choice is yours. . .)

In the Arison ratings, a score of 1 is the best, 5 the worst, and Daniel is given the rare distinction of a numero uno. Then, in addition to a top lifestyle as a Number 1, he is invited to become a Lower Lord, one of the crew that runs the whole underground show.

So far, so good, but Daniel soon discovers that his status is a demonic curse; all is not what it seems. In fact, all the other Number 1s have mysteriously disappeared. . .

DURING the course of delivering the 16th Alan Paton lecture titled “The Examined Life: Paton as autobiographer”, Peter F. Alexander quoted ­Harold Nicholson’s remark that a good biographer needs to be “a snouty little man”.

Does the description apply to Alexander, author of several biographies, including Paton’s? “Someone said that I look into aspects of a person’s life he or she would prefer were best left alone,” Alexander responds. When it comes to writing biographies he is happy to stand by Latin dramatist Terence’s dictum: “I am a human being. I regard nothing ­human as alien to my concern.”

“I am as interested in a subject’s ­finances as their sexual life,” says Alexander. “What fascinates me is their material existence, the day-to-day events and how that is turned into art. That sudden flashing into art.”

Alexander had read Paton’s classic novel Cry, the Beloved Country as a schoolboy and been “profoundly moved by it”. He later studied English at Wits, went to Leeds university in England to do a Masters and then on to Cambridge where he set about a PhD thesis on the South African poet Roy Campbell. Then one day in 1974, Alexander found himself “quite unexpectedly driving to meet Alan Paton in the flesh”. Alexander had been told Paton was working on a biography of Campbell and consequently “would have all the facts at his fingertips”.