In several of her novels—A World of Strangers, The Late Bourgeois World, The Lying Days and The Conservationist—Nadine Gordimer implies that the insulted and injured make substantial ghosts, haunting a society whose survival depands on the maintenance of insult and injury. Indeed, "He's dead but he won't lie down" could serve as an appropriate epigraph to much of her fiction. The South Africa she describes in affectionate, glowing detail is a country in which an abandoned corpse is a common sight…. That body by the roadside, waiting to be disposed of by the "proper channels", has taken on a frightening symbolic vitality—for Miss Gordimer, he is an underground man in more sense than one; he has staked a claim on the earth he will soon inhabit.

Over the thirty odd years of her writing life, Nadine Gordimer's vision has become bleaker and her art more confident. The increases in quality in her work disproves the currently fashionable maxim that only mediocrities develop. The difference between an early book like A World of Strangers (1958) and, say, A Guest of Honour (1971) is immediately striking. In the latter the ideas are contained, given a satisfying aesthetic shape, expressed through character and incident, but in A World of Strangers the ideas displace the characters whose mouths they are put into, with the result that the reader occasionally feels as if he's being lectured. It's a lecture worth paying attention to, of course—her comments on the easiness of liberalism are especially salutary—but the best fiction demonstrates and insinuates rather than explains. The trouble with A World of Strangers is that the novelist uses the ignorance of her principal character, Toby Hood, a well-to-do young Englishman from a cause-espousing family, as a means of informing the ignorant about the precise nature of South African life in the 1950s. A great deal of information is undeniably conveyed, but not without effort: Toby's gradual accumulation of knowledge lacks that sense of messy actuality, of confusion, which so often hinders the progress of spiritual growth.

Conversely, there is far too much in this ambitious novel about the trivial people whose long weekend parties Toby honours with his ironic presence. They are recognizable types, certainly, but the shallowness of their conversation, faithfully recorded, eventually becomes exasperating…. Miss Gordimer doesn't quite sustain the necessary balance between the cocktails-on-the-veranda flippancy which she sets in contrast to the furtive trips to shebeens Tody makes with his black friend, Steben Sitole, where the atmosphere of surface gaiety conceals suspicion and desperation. And yet, with all these faults, A World of Strangers is a book of deep intelligence—an apprentice work by a novelist of real stature.

The Late Bourgeois World, written almost a decade later, is a shorter, more assured performance…. Less wide-ranging than A World of Strangers, it succeeds by concentrating fiercely on a few individuals, whose failures of communication have an everyday authenticity about them.

For the greater part of her career, it has been a critical commonplace to say that Nadine Gordimer is happier with the short story form than with the novel. In a superficial sense, it is an accurate judgement, as the selection Some Monday for Sure make clear: her quiet, unforced skill was evident from the start; and didactism has never affected her stories as it sometimes has her novels. Yet the fact remains that with A Guest of Honour and The Conservationist she has created works of fulfilled ambition. Miss Gordimer's development as a novelist has been a long and painful one, not unlike Conrad's. She has fought her way into the front rank of contemporary writers by taking risks, and the flaws in her early fiction were a necessary factor in that daunting development.