Appropriation or plagiarism? Booker novel poses difficult question | Books | The Guardian

That boundary remains hazy. Among the 13 novels longlisted for this year's International Booker prize, announced last week, is Red Dog by Willem Anker, translated from Afrikaans by Michiel W Heyns. It tells the story of Coenraad de Buys, a seven-foot agent of war who lived and died in the violent, fractured Cape Colony. When I reviewed the novel, unfavourably, in the Times Literary Supplement, my objections lay not just in what I found to be a derivative, repetitious and at times deeply unpleasant book, but in a few sections that bore a striking resemblance to those in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, which raised - as I wrote then - "some discussion about the nature and justification of plagiarism".