The Classifier

15-year-old Chrissie grows up in an Afrikaans household in Durban in the 1970s. His taciturn father is to him a god-like figure, and is known as someone with a very important job in the Government. When his father at last begins to take notice of him and takes him along to his workplace, Chrissie learns that his father is the region's chief classifier of races for Apartheid South Africa, dealing mainly with "problem cases". At first Chrissie is unable to see a conflict between what his father is doing to protect white people, and the fact that he has fallen in love with a girl, Ruthie, who is not white. He cannot resist this girl; their clandestine meetings become more and more difficult to maintain, and something has to give. Told retrospectively, we know that Chrissie has grown into the wealthy businessman he was always going to be as an obsessively entrepreneurial youth, but also that he has become an expat, flung away from his country and from happiness by the system of laws that did not obey the natural ways of human love. A classic and poignantly told rights-of-passage story that calls The Boy in the Striped Pajamas into recollection.