Seven years' imprisonment in South African gaols split the Afrikaner writer Breyten Breytenbach into three. He first avenged himself on his captors with the almost impenetrable prose of Mouroir: Mirrornotes of a Novel, the basis of which he wrote in confinement. This was followed by the pained lucidity of The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, composed immediately after his release. And now comes End Papers, a collection of speeches, letters, pseudo-interviews, poems and other bits and pieces, full of good intentions but also well stocked with banality and platitude, dating from immediately before and after his period of incarceration.

As is now well known. Breytenbach was arrested at Jan Smuts Airport in 1975 while attempting to leave South Africa to return to France, where he had lived since 1961. Under a false name, he entered the country on an underground mission on behalf of the ANC-affiliated group, Okhela, to which he belonged. He was tried and sentenced to nine years' imprisonment, of which he served seven, much of it in solitary confinement. Once arrested, he seemed to lose his stomach for the struggle, and while he did not betray his comrades, Breytenbach admits that the experience of interrogation, trial and imprisonment broke him—an admission which contributes to the impression of reliability and authenticity emanating from The True Confessions.

It is unusual, though not unknown, for a white man to go to prison for his political beliefs in South Africa, and since his release coincided with the increasing volume of lowkey civil war in that country, Breytenbach found himself, in 1982, a celebrity. From having been just a writer, not a very prominent one, he was now a "prison writer"—and, what's more, one who had served his time in the world's most conspicuous trouble spot. Publishers like this sort of thing: Breytenbach's predict that The True Confessions "will rank among the classic writings from prison": a claim that I am not about to argue with. The True Confessions is a monumental work; one which gives full expression to a man's moment by moment struggle to rescue himself from hell. But Breytenbach seems to have taken his achievement as a licence to publish, now, whatever he writes, in the faith that it will be edified by his distinctive experience. End Papers is touted as completing "the publication of Breytenbach's prison writings", which is altogether misleading unless one accepts that everything an ex-convict writes constitutes "prison writings".

For all his having sought, and discovered, a verbal equivalent for pain, for all his intelligent alertness to the twists and turns of morality in an immoral State, Breytenbach is frequently an untidy writer, addicted to diversions, unable to resist puerile jokes and puns. "It is bad manners to talk with your mouth full of words", he remarks, and one is often tempted to use his witticism against him. All three books of "prison writings" would have benefited from firmer editing. The original draft of The True Confessions was typed up from tape-recordings ("talk talk talk") and although it was conscientiously worked over later, the finished product retains a good deal of the speaker's natural loquaciousness.

The tale of Breytenbach's arrest and imprisonment is told in the form of a confession to "Mr Investigator", the cruel incarcerator, with whom the prisoner forms a perverse intimacy, and in the face of whom he experiences not only terror and hatred but respect and even a horrified liking. Mr Investigator, after all, knows more about the wretch behind this account than anyone else does. Mr Investigator specializes in destroying personality, and Breytenbach is quick to admit to him that he has succeeded in destroying his. Some pictures of him taken during his interrogation later appeared in the press:

And then, maybe they weren't of me. Those were the pictures taken of the hulk that they were excavating at that point, or of that man who was alive in that web at that time.

What The True Confessions does so brilliantly is relate how a character disappears under multiple layers of exile in prison: exiled from society at large, from his family, from his former life in Paris where he was already an exile, exiled in solitary confinement from his fellow inmates, and even exiled, like a pariah, from the Afrikaners, his own people, who are holding him. In addition, though, the tale provides a chart, as it were, of the process of reconstruction. In this, the act of writing itself is paramount. "It is by walking that you learn to walk." The True Confessions is the story of the search for the identity of its own narrator.

After much bargaining, with the help of pleas lodged by the Afrikaner literary establishment, Breytenbach was finally allowed to write in prison (his other request, that he be permitted to paint, was refused), on condition that he hand in the fruits of his labours at the end of each day and keep no notes. In return, the "Greys" promised that his pages would be given back on release, and the promise was kept.

This placed the writer in a bizarre situation, having to practise his essentially private activity "knowing that the enemy is reading over your shoulder … knowing also that you are laying bare the most intimate and the most personal nerves and pulsebeats in yourself to the barbarians". The result of this endeavour was Mouroir, a collection of stories written in a prose deliberately refracted in order to elude the philistine scrutiny of Mr Investigator and his cohorts (who, incidentally, included Breytenbach's brothers).

Every prisoner, in whatever society—even those who have to cope only with letter censors—learns the art of literary evasion, some becoming expert in making themselves understood only by those they wish to understand them. The thought of a novel whose form and content are determined by such constraints is an intriguing one, but perhaps Breytenbach has succeeded too well in being elusive. While parts of the intensely lyrical Mouroir are pleasing when read sentence by sentence, a collection of these sentences yields little. In The True Confessions he describes writing in the dark, suggesting that this "wording" is perhaps "akin to the experiments that the surrealists used to make in earlier years", and Breytenbach's kaleidescopic prose does have a similarly random feel about it. Obsessed on the one hand by the necessity to confess, and, on the other, by the omniscience of his totalitarian captors (experts in "washing brains"), Breytenbach has produced in Mouroir a poetic muddle.

One backs away from these "mirrornotes" relieved, at first, to find the solid, recognizable prose of End Papers. The earliest of its thirty-eight items dates from 1967; the latest from June of this year. That Breytenbach treats them most earnestly is attested by the fact that they are furnished with forty pages of "End Notes". But for the most part they are remarkably ordinary: "Dear David", for example, solemnly dated like all the others, is a letter to a passing acquaintance in New York; it includes its own false starts, plus simple observations on Parisian life and American women, with the announcement that the author is a happy male chauvinist ("Never rape a lady against her wishes" is one of his earlier jokes).

There are intelligent responses to South Africa's unique "conscious banalization of humanity", to the call for a cultural boycott, and to the axiom that "time … is Black", but the most striking impression End Papers gives is that Breytenbach now supposes the world is keen to hang on his every word. What he has to say on the nature of the South African State, on apartheid, on repression, on the role of the writer faced by one or more of these, he said to much greater effect in the context of the particularity forced on him by the subject matter of The True Confessions. At this best, he is an explorer of both self and form (and frequently claims that they are inseparable); at worst, he is unable to recognize a jotting when he makes one.