the individual to take some form of direct action against apartheid.

In The Late Bourgeois World (1966), Gordimer begins to experiment with different narrative strategies in order to capture as fully as possible the complexities of human lives in the grip of an oppressive regime. In this brief first-person narration, the main character, Liz Van Den Sandt, seems to begin where Helen Shaw might have continued years later had she returned to South Africa. In a novel that encompasses the events of a single day, Liz first learns of her former husband’s death as the story opens. In the course of the day, which includes her breaking the news to their son at his boarding school, Liz memorializes the death of her politically active former husband. In untangling some mysteries of life and death, she decides that the meaning of life in South Africa includes becoming active and responsible. At the end Liz meets with a former ally of “the cause” and is incited to take subversive political action against apartheid.

The Late Bourgeois World marks a definite turning point in the way that Gordimer writes about the influence of politics on people. Until then, and in the short stories of the 1950’s and 1960’s, Gordimer emphasized the course of individual human lives, focusing on people’s personal joys and pains. As Gordimer’s own political consciousness grew, she found the novel form more difficult to write because her worldview had grown considerably.

One complaint that uninitiated readers have about Gordimer’s later novels concerns the difficulty of identifying who is narrating or speaking about the events. The later novels use dashes instead of quotation marks to indicate speech, making the shift from external narration to dialogue or from characters’ thoughts to speech a bit more difficult to note. Ambiguity, at times, reflects the dangers involved in speaking the truth; shifts in narrative perspective emphasize the variety of views. As in the various forces that make up and affect the political situation in South Africa, Gordimer’s narrative strategies reflect the complexities of human relationships. Gordimer’s novels mirror the political and social reality without oversimplifying the devastating consequences.

In A Guest of Honour, the former administrator (who is white) has been invited to return to a liberated Africa in order to reform its educational system. Colonel Bray’s observations of the effects of revolution reveal his sensitivity to the injustices that apartheid has inflicted upon the country. As the novel progresses, the reader experiences Bray’s split allegiance to the two new black leaders as well as to white South Africa. In The Conservationist, the white landowner treats his help with great indifference and arrogance; after all, he is the boss. Although Mehring owns the land (the veld, as the landscape in South Africa is called), he does not understand it in the way the black natives do. Through a series of unusual events and natural catastrophes, Mehring slowly loses first the control of the land and then the land itself. By the novel’s end, Mehring may be dead, and the ambiguity of this event is displaced by the one that closes the novel: The blacks are burying one of their own in their land.

Like The Conservationist, Burger’s Daughter employs a multiperspective narration. At times, the reader appears to be inside the head of the main character and at other times to be watching that character involved in some objective situation. At times, the narrative perspective appears to be in the first person while at other times it appears omniscient. While these approaches may appear unusual, they are in fact consistent with the complicated situations that Gordimer represents in her fiction. For example, when Rosa Burger remembers the past, she thinks of herself as “another” person, one who used to do or say certain things. When she is seen waiting outside the prison at the age of fourteen, the narrative must capture the fact that “she” is being watched by someone else. Later, when her activities are directly under police surveillance, it is reasonable to expect the narrative to tell what was observed about her. If Rosa remembers a conversation she had with a former lover, she indicates that it was “I” who said or felt these things.

Gordimer begins to take greater liberties at finding different forms to capture the essence of the vastness and complexities of those living under apartheid and to express precisely the events that are private and public. In both July’s People and A Sport of Nature (1987), she casts the events in the future, after a revolution might already have occurred.

Her three novels of the 1990’s chart the period of change from apartheid to democracy in South Africa. In these Gordimer continues chronicling how personal lives are impacted by politics. My Son’s Story (1990) focuses on a family that becomes involved in the struggle for freedom. Although Gordimer had previously used minority characters as narrators in her short fiction, this is her first novel narrated by a mixed-race character, Will, the son named for William Shakespeare. In My Son’s Story the method of narration seems dual—alternating between Will’s first-person account and a seemingly external voice. However, at the end of the novel, Will claims both voices, having spoken in the first person as the son—whose father, sister, and mother all become involved in fighting for freedom—and in the third person as a writer who has imagined what he could not know as an individual. Together the voices create the story, not only of his family but also of the turmoil that is South Africa.

The action of None to Accompany Me covers the end of apartheid and the beginnings of democracy. Vera Stark, true to her name, whittles her interests and activities to what she sees as essential. Ultimately, her work satisfies her more than marriage, family, and her home. A lawyer, she works to minimize the movement of blacks to inferior sections of South Africa and, when it becomes possible, works to reclaim land for their use. The House Gun echoes a major concern of the new South Africa—how to come to terms with past violence. An adult son of two liberal South Africans has killed a man—a personal, not a political, act. The novel traces how these three characters need to find a way to reconcile themselves to the truth of the murder before their lives can move forward. The parents must also face how they feel about depending upon a respected black lawyer to handle Duncan’s case.

The Pickup and Get a Life continue meshing the political and the personal. Gordimer has often said that she believes politics and sex are the strongest forces affecting individuals. These dual concerns govern the complex relationship between Julie Summers, a white privileged South African, and Ibrahim ibn Musa, an illegal Arab immigrant, in The Pickup. In Get a Life the personal and political are metaphorically embodied in Paul Bannerman. At thirty-five, diagnosed with thyroid cancer, he receives radioactive iodine treatment. To avoid possibly contaminating his wife and son, he moves back with his parents, who care for him as he recuperates. As an ecologist working to see that the inevitable progress in South Africa is not destructive to the environment, Paul has been concerned with a proposed nuclear reactor. In Paul and in the environment, the dangers of contamination are juxtaposed with the human ability to thwart the danger and maintain life. The novel deals with the relationships in the two marriages, Paul’s and his parents’. On a personal and political level accommodations must be made between the real and the ideal: How much disparity in values and actions can marriages survive? How much interference by industrial man can nature withstand?

The Conservationist

First published: 1974

Type of work: Novel

In the wake of political change and natural catastrophes in South Africa, a white landowner loses everything.

The Conservationist was held by the South African Censorship Board for ten weeks before it was finally released to the public. The novel, which tells the story of a white landowner named Mehring whose farm is run by black natives, begins with the discovery of a dead African found on Mehring’s land. At the end, after a careless burial by white policemen exposes the body, the native is given a proper burial by the blacks who work Mehring’s farm. The story’s final sentences summarize the spirit of the novel: “They had put him away to rest, at last; he had come back. He took possession of this earth, theirs; one of them.” In an interview in the Paris Review in 1983, Gordimer explained that the African battle cry, mayibuye, means “Africa, come back”; it is also the slogan of the ANC. The “coming back” refers to the return of the dead in the novel as well as to the theme that blacks will someday reclaim Africa as their own.

In combining the resurrection theme with a political one, Gordimer conveys a larger message that deals with life and death under apartheid. The image of the dead African permeates the other events in the novel and serves as a constant reminder of the shallowness of Mehring, who owns and rules a piece of Africa without understanding the land or the natives who inhabit it. In this respect, Mehring is like the living dead who unnaturally impose their values on those who are forced to exist under apartheid.

Mehring’s actions are completely detached from those of the Africans in the novel. His activities include driving his Mercedes into town to attend parties or other social gatherings, where he is seen in a variety of situations that reveal his dissatisfaction with his life. By contrast, the Africans are represented in ritual events that strengthen their tie to the land: dances, the community’s slaughter of a calf, a kind of Christmas party, and, most important, the burial of the dead African at the novel’s end. While Mehring appears bored or has unpropitious sexual encounters, the Africans are actively engaged with their work, even with the menial tasks that will keep the farm running. Mehring’s personal relationships are also disparate ones. He has lost contact with his son, and his mistress Antonia becomes increasingly disconnected from him. Meanwhile the Africans are portrayed in situations that suggest the strength of their community. Jacobus, the farm’s foreman, is the mediator between Mehring and the land and is the first to inform the owner of the dead body. It is also Jacobus who brings the Africans together to bury the dead and call for the return of Africa.

If Mehring is to symbolize the decline of the white ruling class, Gordimer achieves this message with the amazing storm that literally sweeps Mehring off his land. In his last scene in the novel, Mehring is fleeing from the farm, after the African’s dead body is washed up by the storm, when he spots and picks up a colored woman hitchhiker; they drive to a deserted cyanide mine dump. The scene ends ambiguously with the presence of a third person who may be a coconspirator with the colored woman, and the culmination of the encounter appears as a prelude to Mehring’s demise.

The novel frequently shifts perspectives to achieve the full effects of the events. Sometimes Mehring is speaking of events in the present; at other times he is reflecting upon or remembering some other event. At still other times in the novel, there appears to be a completely detached observer who is recounting events. The shifts set a swift pace to events that are otherwise stagnant in development. They also capture the distinct events as they occur. For example, in the scenes where the Africans are involved in communal or ritual activities, it would be unrealistic for Mehring to narrate the fullness of the events, since he is never present at any of their affairs. Similarly, it is impossible for any of the Africans to narrate Mehring’s activities and thoughts, since these people do not seem to possess the language skills to do so convincingly.

The Conservationist contains the author’s vision that blacks will someday reclaim Africa. In the 1970’s, when the novel appeared, the Black Power movement had been gaining momentum. Blacks argued that they must speak their cause on their own behalf and must first return to the traditions and roots of Africa in order to do so. Furthermore, in the liberation of Africa from white rule, it was unfortunate but essential that whites become fully dispossessed. Only in an ultimate and absolute return of the land to those who first inhabited it could liberation be complete. When the novel closes, Mehring’s fate is unspecified but nevertheless certain, and the Africans are totally engaged with the forces that constitute life and death.

Burger’s Daughter

First published: 1979

Type of work: Novel

A young woman comes to personal and political terms with the meaning of the life and the death of her father.

Burger’s Daughter expresses well the author’s contention that “fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.” The novel is the evolution of Rosa Burger’s awareness and understanding of the forces that make up the life of her politically active family. It also chronicles the fictitious life of Lionel Burger, a white member of the Communist Party, and the activities that reflect the historical development of South African politics from the 1920’s to the 1970’s. Through the lives of the father and the daughter, Gordimer explores the possibilities present to the Burger family and shows the choices that they make.

One of the novel’s main themes concerns the degree to which an individual is expected to make a political commitment to the life of the republic. Initially, in Rosa’s case, the choice to go against apartheid is in fact the legacy from her family rather than from anything resembling a personal decision. In the course of the novel, Rosa retraces the steps of her family’s past, as she also understands the real and devastating effects of a segregated society. She makes a series of difficult choices that land her in a South African prison at the novel’s end.

The novel begins with Rosa at the age of fourteen, as she waits alongside others who have come to bring supplies and messages to imprisoned loved ones. She is seen in a schoolgirl’s uniform carrying a quilt and a hot-water bottle for her mother, who is in prison. The narrative shifts from this third-person perspective to the voice of Rosa herself as she recounts that event from girlhood, as well as the many others that shape her life.

The tone of the first-person perspective is self-analytical, as it reflects upon Rosa’s personal experiences. She recounts her brother’s death by drowning; her mother’s death by multiple sclerosis; the intense love relationship with a man named Conrad; the imprisonment and death of her father; the first time she leaves South Africa and politics to spend a yearlong respite in Paris with Madame Bagnelli (Katya), her father’s first wife; and finally, the events that lead to her own decision to be involved with politics after all.

Against the background of her family’s history lies that of South Africa. Two major events are reported in Burger’s Daughter that lend factual veracity to the fictional story: the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960, preceding Lionel’s final arrest, and the Soweto Riots of 1976. In her remembrances of the events, Rosa addresses her thoughts to her past lover Conrad as well as to Madame Bagnelli. Only at the end of the novel does Rosa address her dead father, admonishing him as well as herself for the choices made in their lifetimes.

Among Rosa’s many encounters and experiences, perhaps the most striking one is the phone call she receives one night from Baasie, years after they played together as children in the Burger household. He reproaches her for what he perceives as her capitalizing on her father’s name without understanding the real plight of blacks in South Africa. As a dispossessed black, Baasie refers to a political rally at which he spotted her and condemns her patronage of the black cause. Rosa is literally sickened by the encounter with this disembodied voice from her past, but it nevertheless encourages her to take some form of political action.

Like The Conservationist, Burger’s Daughter is told with multiple points of view in the narrative. Although the bulk of the novel is told from Rosa’s perspective, other perspectives are operating in the novel as well. There is an objective voice that fills in the gaps of the Burger family’s history as well as South Africa’s political history, and there appears to be another objective perspective told by someone who is particularly familiar with Rosa’s life and compassionately reports the facts. When Rosa is under surveillance, reports of her activities appear in an “official” capacity.

All of these combined narrative strategies produce a full presentation of Rosa’s life as it is constituted by her family and her country. The novel also addresses the issue of individual identity in two contexts: Can the individual be truly autonomous, or is the individual always the object of historical forces over which he or she has very little final control? Rosa is not unduly oppressed by these concerns, and her narrative is particularly balanced in the way it presents the possibilities available to her under the circumstances.

Thrust at birth into the hotbed of political concerns, Rosa discovers that her father’s legacy does not necessarily preclude her individual actions and choices. In the end, she determines that being Burger’s daughter means respecting her father’s choices as well as finding the terms for her own existence.

July’s People

First published: 1981

Type of work: Novel

This work focuses on the plight of a white family during a successful period of black liberation.

July’s People is set in a time and place when the African effort to liberate blacks from white rule has successfully taken place. The entire country has become a battleground; the novel focuses on the plight of the Smaleses, an enlightened white middle-class family.

Bamford and Maureen Smales are “rescued” from deterioration by their servant, July, who takes them and their children into his native village. On the way there, July is seen literally caring for them, and it is obvious to the reader that he has not entirely abandoned his socialized role as a servant to white people. The Smaleses are uncomfortable with the shifting situation as they discover their increasing dependence on July. The novel’s epigraph is an emblem of what the reader might expect in the course of events. Gordimer quotes from Quaderni del carcere (1948-1951; partial translation as Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, 1971): “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.” Africa is experiencing a change, and both blacks and whites are caught in the “interregnum,” in the midst of change itself.

Gordimer, however, does not simplify the political implications. In other words, she does not advocate a view that white liberals such as the Smaleses must necessarily be excluded from black liberation. Neither does she cast an approving eye on the transition to black South African rule. Both groups experience pains in the transition; the new cannot yet be born in the middle of all the changes. Everyone is thrust into chaos and uncertainty; all social roles are shifting and changing.

If the lack of a concrete political agenda is a major issue in the novel, it also turns everything upside down for all the characters. For one thing, sexual roles are confused. Bamford, who had been the head of the household, is emasculated by relying on his former servant to save him and his family. Subsequently, he becomes figuratively, then literally, impotent, since he progressively loses his ability to relate to Maureen in any marital way. Much of the perspective of events is seen through Maureen’s experiences. She comes to see more clearly the lines drawn to differentiate race, class, and gender. More specifically, she understands that the lines allow for cultural oppression at many levels. Like many white South Africans who inherited their place in the country from generations of black oppression, however, Maureen does not know how to make a radical change in her own daily way of being.

July himself responds to the changes by acting in the most pragmatic way: He takes care of the white people as he has always done and, given the situation, takes the logical step of bringing them to his village. There, July has them meet the chief, whose main concern is to solicit Bamford’s aid in combating the Russians and Cubans, whom the chief considers to be worse enemies than the white South Africans. The old relationship between July and the Smaleses takes on a new, but hardly radical, dimension as the white family becomes divested of their former “authority.” Because July has always lived in the city and taken care of the Smaleses, the transposition to the village does not in fact change his role very much—July is still taking care of the family—only now, July answers to the authority of the chief.

The novel raises the question of who should properly rule Africa—the whites who have profited from the suppression of blacks, or the blacks who have failed to adapt to the industrial growth of the country? Gordimer projects a vision of the future, one that is filled with many complex considerations, and appears uneasy about making a prophetic statement. In essence, South Africa is always undergoing political and social turmoil, since its policy of apartheid displaces all people at all levels.

July’s people, then, are both the blacks and the whites who constitute Africa. In this novel, however, there do not appear to be any heroes who will rescue the entire nation.

“Town and Country Lovers”

First published: 1975 (collected in the 1982 edition of Six Feet of the Country)

Type of work: Short stories

Two pairs of lovers suffer the consequences of opposing South African law.

Originally published as merely “City Lovers,” in 1975, it was expanded for Gordimer’s 1980 collection A Soldier’s Embrace to be “Town and Country Lovers.” The two short stories “City Lovers” and “Country Lovers” are paired stories that reveal the devastating personal effects of racial segregation and were included in the 1982 edition of Six Feet of the Country. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 and the Immorality Act of 1950 were laws passed by the white government to prevent miscegenation in any form. In “City Lovers,” Dr. Franz-Josef von Leinsdorf is a foreign geologist who becomes sexually involved with a colored shopgirl. The girl, who is appropriately unnamed to indicate her lack of social status, becomes little more than the object of the doctor’s sexual and domestic needs. The two are arrested, and their transgression is made public. In “Country Lovers,” a white boy and a black girl grow up together and become teenage lovers. Although the girl, Thebedi, marries a black man, she soon gives birth to a child that was no doubt fathered by Paulus, her white lover. At the story’s end, the child is dead and the parents stand trial, but insufficient evidence fails to convict either parent for violating the law.

Both stories are told in a straightforward manner and tone, but the emotional impact of the events is strongly suggested. In the compact form of a short story, Gordimer effectively captures the impact of South African laws upon individual lives.

The Pickup

First published: 2001

Type of work: Novel

A car malfunction leads to an unexpected and problematic relationship between Julie Summers, a privileged white South African, and Abdu, an illegal Arab immigrant.

Julie Summers picks up a mechanic, who uses the name Abdu while working illegally in South Africa. Although she initiates the relationship, he, too, may be implicated in the pickup. In Julie, Abdu sees someone who has access to what he hopes to achieve: citizenship and a position of worth in a meaningful society.

Ironically, the characters’ contrasting values, needs, and desires sometimes become clear to the reader before they are evident to Abdu and Julie. Abdu insists Julie introduce him to her family; Julie sees no reason for this, as she has separated herself from her divorced parents and their privileged lifestyles. During the visit to her father, Julie is embarrassed by the lavish house and hospitality, but Abdu respects the success of her father and his friends. A reversal happens weeks later, after Abdu has been deported and Julie travels with him to his country. Julie is surprised that Abdu insists upon their marriage before he brings her to his family home; she has no respect for a marriage certificate issued by a government deporting him. Abdu is embarrassed by his dirty, impoverished North African village, but Julie becomes entranced living with his large, extended family on the edge of a desert that she, but not Abdu, sees as spiritual.

Several times the narrator intrudes, addressing the readers directly. In the second and third paragraphs of the novel, the narrator makes clear that the novel mainly investigates Julie’s story. The novel imagines what might happen when a young, privileged South African woman, who is open to experience and wants to reject her privileges gained through a racist society, meets her opposite. The narrator more often gives Julie’s thoughts rather than Abdu’s; the narrator follows her much more often than him. Therefore, Julie’s love for Abdu is clear long before readers can be sure of Abdu’s feelings for her. Despite early suggestions that Julie’s love for Abdu might be met with his use of her—as a person who has access to wealth and power—late in the novel it becomes apparent that Abdu does love Julie and respects her freedom to choose and her independence. He believes his country has curtailed his life choices.

The method of narration is appropriate for the novel, although it may cause readers difficulty. It shifts from an omniscient voice to the characters’ thoughts and dialogue without clear markers. Readers must come to understand the characters in order to know when words signify thoughts or dialogue and to whom they belong. The ambiguity and uncertainty readers experience parallels the feelings the characters have as they continue their unexpected and difficult relationship. The novel ends with both characters holding true to their desires: Ibrahim ibn Musa (Abdu) flying to the United States to find a better life, and Julie staying in his village with the solace of family and the desert and her newfound ability to teach English.