Way Up, Way Out

Strachan wrote an early draft of the book very quickly after a friend persuaded him to start writing in his 70s.^[4] Strachan's original title was So It Goes, a reference to the anti-war book Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut.^[5] He had intended the book to be an anti-war one: "I wanted it to be about four wars, ... because I'd known men from four imperial wars, you know – the Anglo-Zulu War, the Anglo-Boer War, World War 1, World War 2 – which I was in at the, at the gat kant".^{[nb 1][6]}

He was disappointed with the edited version that was published.^[4] The South African academic Zoë Molver contends that the book was "bowdlerised" in the editing process, giving examples of how the original language was edited to adjust racial terms and much material relating to historical background was excised.^[7]

The publisher, David Philip, described the book on its front cover as a "satirical novel". Dan Jacobson said in response, "While much of it is satirical in intention, as a whole it deserves a much grander designation. It is in fact a Bildungsroman, a novel describing the formation of a character or soul". He commented in the London Review of Books that Strachan had "seized eagerly on the expressive potentialities of South African English demotic speech ... in order to make something new and rare of it".^[8] He made a link between the protagonist's "call to arms" in the Second World War and the author's motivation in his involvement in the struggle against apartheid.^[9] David Evans said the publisher's description was inaccurate and that the book was the "first part of a semi-autobiographical trilogy". He also commented that "...the overall effect [is] rather like a multilayered painting, early touches being picked up later, the clever patterning only fully appreciated at the end". Sam Sole called Way Up, Way Out a "remarkable autobiography filled with rich and lunatic prose", and Athol Fugard described Strachan's "extraordinary gift for story telling which in my opinion makes him the rightful heir to the Herman Charles Bosman crown of our time". Jane Rosenthal wrote "Whether it is a memoir or a novel is interesting but irrelevant: it rings true".^[10][11]

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Bibliography