Dan Jacobson, who has died aged 85, should rank as one the leading novelists of his time. That he was never regarded as such was the result of a combination of factors. He was unusually hard to "place" as an author: he was born and raised in apartheid-era South Africa, but the greater part of his life was spent in Britain. His fiction evolved faster than those who most admired him could always keep up with. He shed authorial skins like a snake, each time allowing a new Jacobson to emerge but one which sometimes disappointed those fondly attached to the old Jacobson. And in his later years he moved, powerfully, into non-fictional literary territories: autobiography, travel writing and even theology. His relationship with his inherited Judaism was intense, but complicated. "How to make sense of it all?" he mused.
He was born in Johannesburg, one of four children of a Latvian father, Hyman, and a Lithuanian mother, Liebe (nee Melamed), both of whom had fled their homelands. Jacobson was brought up in Kimberley. It was a dull town diamonds went down with everything else in the slump but one of the places on the globe where Jews were safe to enjoy a dull life.
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