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Nadine Gordimer’s 1998 novel The House Gun describes a familiar post-apartheid South Africa scenario: A white boy kills his housemate with “the house gun.” His parents cannot believe that he would do so deliberately. This narrative – white-on-white violence in a security-obsessed, gun-savvy, walled society – is in contrast to the other great narrative of white South African literature: arming oneself against the impoverished hordes outside the walls. And it is these two narratives – the “conflicting accounts” as the papers say – that are competing in the case of Oscar Pistorius.