Nadine
Gordimer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1991, won the Booker
Prize in 1974 for her novel The Conservationist (a joint winner,
together with Stanley Middleton’s Holiday.)
The Setting
of The
Conservationist is South Africa in the 1970s (the novel is
contemporaneous in the sense it was published in 1974). The Apartheid is at its
fiercest; the minority whites are enjoying all the privileges, subjugating the
majority blacks who are leading the lives of serfs; and in-between the two
communities are the Indians, brought to South Africa in the nineteenth
century—just as they were taken to the Caribbean—as plantation labourers, but
who have, since then, bettered their lot somewhat.
The Conservationist creates for its reader—at a rural
farm— a microcosm of the wider South African Society.
At the top
of the pecking order is Mehring, a rich, white businessman who has made his fortune
in the pig iron industry; he is also on the board of directors of several profit-making
enterprises. Mehring buys a farm, half an hour’s drive from the city in which
he lives. Mehring is not a farmer; he knows less about farming than I know
about horse ballet. He has bought a farm for two reasons: he managed to get a
good deal and feels that in due course he will sell the farm making a handsome
profit. Secondly the farm is a kind of Shangri-la for Mehring, his asylum from
the increasingly wearisome (for him) world of the rich in the city—endless
diners and swimming-pool parties on weekends where bored housewives of rich
executives gossip and (some of them) make passes at him.
The farm
may be an escape route for Mehring, but he is far removed from the lives of the
blacks, who have lived on and near the farm for decades, if not longer, and who
have worked for some or the other white owner. Mehring has no real
understanding of and, therefore, empathy towards the blacks. His attitude
towards them veers between amused tolerance and contemptuous suspicion (of
their intentions). The blacks on their part treat Mehring as nothing more than
a fugacious presence in the history of the land. Mehring is wary of the
intentions of the blacks; he is suspicious that they are out to fleece him by concocting non-existent problems and inventing difficulties. In the eyes of the
blacks Mehring is the supplanter, who has defrauded them of that which is
rightfully theirs by the power of his money. All of this is implied. Gordimer
is too clever a writer to spell it all out for the reader.
The local
grocery shop is run by a large Indian Muslim family. ‘The India’ (as the black
workers on Mehring’s farm refer to the family) has an uneasy relationship both
with the blacks and the whites. The Indians know that they have to grease the
palms of the white officials for the continuance of their licence. The blacks
and Indians, both subdued and exploited by the whites, have no common purpose
between them, however, no sense of solidarity or camaraderie—the two
communities probably see one another in nothing more than crude
generalizations. Mehring’s contempt for the Indians—marginally less than that
reserved for the blacks—is commingled with grudging respect for the their grit.
Also, Indians are crafty—like the Jews, Mehring thinks, at one point in the
novel—and need to be watched more closely.
In her
elliptical prose Gordimer sets forth for the reader the racial tensions and
inequalities in Apartheid era South Africa. Decades after it was first
published, The Conservationist can be said to be of historical interest,
depict as it does the life in the now extinct Apartheid in South Africa. It is
a prerequisite, one guesses, of any Apartheid era novel—especially by someone
like Gordimer who made her reputation with novels that dealt with moral and
racial issues in her country in which existed the worst kind of inequality
imaginable—that it must contain filthy rich white leading privileged (if empty
and ultimately sterile) lives, and the exploited majority, disenfranchised and
reduced to leading subhuman existence in their own country. The greatness of such novels also seems to be
determined by the big themes and grand—if unequal—oppositions: the high and
mighty versus the low and the weak; beautiful versus ugly; a society in
turmoil, a culture in crisis; that sort of thing.
The Conservationist has all of the above in abundance.
Yet, when you finally reach the last page of this not-easy-to-read novel, if
you still have breath left in you, you are left with the nagging doubt that
while you have read something important you haven’t loved the novel. You struggle
to think what it was that you liked—indeed there was anything you liked—about it.
Is there a
plot? Not really. The novel opens with the discovery of a corpse in one of the
pastures of Mehring’s farm. It is the corpse of an unknown black man who, most
probably, has been murdered in a feud rampant in the community over, most
probably, some paltry sum of money (Mehring thinks detachedly). Mehring, who
views the death of the black man with the detachment of watching a spider
swallowed by the whorl of toilet water, becomes annoyed when the police bury
the corpse in his land instead of whisking it away. The corpse resurfaces when,
after torrential rains, Mehring’s land gets flooded. As the novel ends the
blacks are giving their nameless brethren a decent burial. The blacks—it is
implied—have more warmth in their hearts for a nameless corpse than for Mehring
who pays them; and with good reasons. The corpse serves the symbolic purpose (I think) of
representing the increasingly precarious position of whites in South Africa,
hinting that their crimes would not remain buried forever. This symbolism
however remains buried in cold, tortuous, at times clunky, and unemotional
prose.
The novel
has no warmth. That is because Mehring, from whose perspective most of the
novel is narrated, is a cold person. With the exception of his mistress (a
rich, white, cynical, bored wife of an academic), who has left him and South
Africa, Mehring appears to be incapable of having ardent feelings for anyone (and even
with her, his thoughts tread a fine line between nostalgia and obsession). The
reader is told that Mehring’s wife has left him (probably because when she got
into bed with him she had to shoo away the penguins) and now lives in America.
Their only son, Terry (who makes periodic appearances in the novel), spends
most of his vacation in Namibia with an old German couple whose relationship
with Mehring is never made clear. Mehring may be very rich but his is a lonely,
isolated and ultimately futile existence (money can’t buy you happiness and all
that . . . although you don’t get the feeling that the piss-poor blacks working
on Mehring’s farm are happy bunnies either; there aren't many happy people in
this novel). Mehring is not an evil man. He thinks that he deserves his wealth
which he has earned through hard work. He genuinely believes that he treats the
black farmhands—the kindest emotion he can muster up for them is pity—on his
farm justly and (within reasonable limits of) generosity, oblivious all along of
the inherent inequality and iniquity of the South African society that has
enabled him to attain this advantaged position. Introspection is not Mehring’s
strong point.
The Conservationist requires serious efforts of
concentration. As I plodded through pages after pages of (not particularly
riveting) descriptions of Mehring’s farm and countryside, in sentences longer
than the English Channel, my concentration began to falter. More than once I
came close to accepting defeat and jacking it in. (It took me two weeks to read
the novel which has less than 300 pages; by the time I reached the last third
of the novel I was a spent force. Would I have spent the two weeks more
fruitfully reading Jeffrey Archer who, whatever else he might be accused of,
can never be accused of being abstruse; that’s why he will not win the Nobel,
but will sell by the basinful at the airports.)
Gordimer’s
immersive style makes the reading of the novel more arduous. The dialogues are
tricky to follow, not only because it is often not very clear who is speaking
to whom, but also because of her penchant (evident in her other novels) of
substituting quotation marks with hyphens. From time to time you come across
sentences in which hyphens serve their traditional purpose, which gets a bit
confusing. Gordimer has a curious reluctance to identify characters by names;
instead they are referred to by the pronoun he. It is not always easy to follow
who ‘he’ is. Mehring is rarely referred to by anything other than a ‘he’. In
the chapter where Mehring’s son Terry comes to visit him, you realise only
after you have been one third through the chapter that the ‘he’, this time
round, is Mehring’s son. Gordimer’s sentences are truly distracting, not
because they have sass or swagger, but because they are like the monotonous
ticking of a clock driving you nuts.
Once in a
while there are interludes of lucid prose. Like the chapter in which Mehring
(at least I think the ‘he’ in this chapter is Mehring) finger**ks a teenage
girl of Portuguese extraction in the chair next to him during a long distance
flight. (What was that about?) But such passages are far and few between: for
most of the time reading The Conservationist is like trying
to drive a car through dense fog.
The Conservationist is probably an important novel, a
novel that high-brow critics will no doubt describe as a milestone. I didn't enjoy it though. That was because for the most of the novel I struggled to
gauge what the hell was going on, and whether there was anything subterranean
under the surface, which itself was like a wet road shining and blinding you
with the low sun. I think I got what Gordimer was trying to say, here, but didn't like the writing style.
The Conservationist is the third novel of Nadine
Gordimer that I have read. Years ago I read My Son’s Story and House
Gun. My Son’s Story left me
with a headache; House Gun was more interesting. And now I have read The
Conservationist, which has left me feeling less than ecstatic. Should I
give up on her? (A South African acquaintance said that Gordimer did not
represent the best of South African writing, Nobel Prize notwithstanding.
However, upon further inquiry it transpired that he had not read a single novel
of Gordimer but had heard a clever d**k at University (who probably hadn't read
her either) spouting these pearls of wisdom.) I am not prepared to give up on
Gordimer just yet. I shall read Julie’s People, Burger’s Daughter, and The
Late Bourgeois World. But not for a while.
