80. The Conservationist, Nadine Gordimer
Joint winner of the Booker Prize in 1974. This is a complex novel, a challenging read in more than one way.
The book depicts Mehring, a prosperous white business man, who has bought a farm outside Johannesberg - partly as a tax dodge, partly to impress a married woman who he is hoping will sneak off there to meet him. Mehring is capable of waxing romantically about the farm, the land, the wildlife, but the reader can see that he is a neglectful custodian, dropping by only when it suits him and failing to invest either in the farm or in the black families who live there and work for him. Mehring is a subtly, but deeply, unpleasant man. He doesn't commit violence but his attitudes are contemptuous - towards women, the young, and of course anyone who isn't white.
What Gordimer does, cleverly, is to trick us, when we let our guard down, into a sort of sympathy for Mehring, by telling the story from his point of view - from inside his head, in fact, as the story is told in a wandering, stream-of-consciousness way
If I had your money. A night bought and secured. The price of an air ticket has put him on a plane, and the fee of a good lawyer has you safely six hundred miles from this house. He might telephone, why not, after all this time, at this distance, if he knew where she was. He had the impulse once, from Montreal. No danger of tapping-devices there to alarm you:- Trouble, you said, loving it. All you do love.
The style isn't opaque exactly, but it's unpredictable, and requires the reader's full attention. Key facts are hinted at, or dropped quietly into the middle of long paragraphs about something else. Mehring may be thinking about one thing, but the author wants us to notice something else. And this is what is really skilful - I read a review somewhere that called this "show don't tell" stretched almost to breaking point - the way that Gordimer puts you into someone's head, with his thoughts, making him almost sympathetic at times (his foot gets caught in thick mud, there's a moment of panic, and you will him to escape, you feel the sudden fear and the survival instinct kick in) yet clearly, clearly showing you what he actually is.
This is, of course, a deeply political novel; Gordimer was an ANC member, a friend of Nelson Mandela, who continued to live in South Africa throughout her life despite the fact that the apartheid government banned several of her books. The title hints at one of the underlying themes - the desire, the urge, for change and justice, and the opposing forces working to maintain the status quo. Mehring thinks that people like him will rule South Africa for ever - the author, at a time when hope must have been in short supply, believes that change will come.