This was a hard novel to read. Not hard in the James Joyce sense--Nadine Gordimer didn't make up words (though there were a handful of Afrikaner terms that sometimes took some puzzling or looking-up). Quite a lot of it was written in a stream-of-consciousness style, and what made it harder was the difficulty in deciphering whose consciousness is being streamed. Eventually, I had to give up trying to figure whose thoughts or words were whose at any given moment, and simply take in the novel as a whole, and try and sort it out later.
So: Nadine Gordimer is a South African writer and liberal. During the old apartheid regime, some of her works were banned in her native land, and she was a member of the illegal ANC. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. The Conservationist was published in 1974 and was a co-winner of the Booker Prize that year.
The protagonist, Mehring, is a rich and successful South African businessman in his 40's. He lives a life on the road, mostly for business, flying to Europe, Japan, Brazil. When he's back in South Africa, he spends his weekends at a farm he bought in what is apparently an attempt to bring back--what? His youth? Not really--his memories of youth seem primarily centered around his first seduction, that of a married woman more than twice his age during the war years. An idealized home for a family? Except he's extremely divorced and completely detached from his only son. Eventually, he uses his farm as bait: an idyllic getaway and trysting site for whatever woman he's currently pursuing.
It's hard to tell the women apart, actually. There is a female voice, very strident and liberal (and privileged) throughout the novel that is never explicitly identified. His ex-wife? Or perhaps a consolidation of all the women he's ever lusted after?
Except that "lusted" implies passion of some kind, and Mehring does not appear to have any. Virtually the only passion he shows is anger at black children collecting the eggs of guinea fowl on his farm: he hates to see the fowl disappearing.
While the majority of the book is told from Mehring's approximate point of view, others do come to the forefront occasionally: Jacobus, the farm overseer, who handles the day-to-day running of the farm, Jacobus's family members and underlings, the Indians who run the local general store. All of these people live in the margins of society, most of them surviving despite illegal working status due to bribery or anonymity.
Perhaps the key to the book is the dead body that is discovered at the beginning of the novel. A black man is dead, quite possibly murdered. The police claim to have limited resources and are unable to take care of matters immediately, so they take the extraordinary step of burying the body, with the intention of digging it up again later and investigating it at some unknown point in the future. Of course they never do, and Mehring would submit a strongly-worded complaint to the authorities--but he can't be bothered. Ultimately, the only matters he takes an active hand in is chasing after women far younger than himself--or perhaps he only seemingly is the active party in those cases, and is really drawn in, irrelevant of his own actions.
Gordimer is a wordsmith with a poetic use of language. Her descriptions of people and places are also vivid and beautiful. More's the pity that reading the novel is such a frustrating experience. Everyone is passive, waiting for the end, possibly a destructive one--perhaps this was a novel that had a greater impact prior to the end of apartheid, since we now know that the system ended relatively peacefully via reform rather than violent revolution.
In the end, a difficult read that was more of a chore to get through than any other novel so far on this journey. It was possible to take pleasure in some of the detail, but the larger forms did not seem worth the effort.
Next up: 1974's other Booker Prize winner, Holiday by Stanley Middleton.
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