Fiction: The defeat of apartheid is no longer a dream. It is now reality, an established chapter in history. But this does not mean South Africa is paradise regained. Far from it.
The 1991 Nobel literature laureate, Nadine Gordimer, truth-teller and warrior of conscience, has continued to alert the world to the evils that lurk in a country that ironically possesses the physical qualities of an Eden, as well as the horrors of hell. Her post-apartheid South Africa is no Eden, it is a place in which the new liberalism carries its own dangers as the past and the environment are threatened by progress. Greed is the new racism.
Get a Life is dominated by ironies, symbols and seething urgency. The narrative is one of icy outrage. The prose is blunt, hurried and conveys the writer's familiar exasperation at the madness of human kind. Never a great stylist, possibly because her writing has always come from having something definite to say, rather than a story to tell, this time Gordimer gives the impression she is actually spitting the words out. She sees a country still under threat and about to fall victim to new distortions.
Not surprisingly her central character, Paul Bannerman, is a potential hero. Still youngish at 35, he is handsome and good. He has a conscience, and in the course of the narrative he begins to see everything more clearly. Here is an Adam - the symbolism will become vital - who is an ecologist. He campaigns for the environment. Metaphorically, he is a gardener who tends his garden - in his case, planet Earth.
But although outwardly healthy to look at, he has been felled by cancer. Post-operative radiation treatment leaves him radioactive, contaminated, a leper - and temporarily too dangerous to be with his wife and small son. Instead he returns to his boyhood home to recover. There his white, liberal parents - a successful lawyer mother and recently retired businessman father - will tend the precious only son among four grown children. Gordimer is strong on these practical domestic details; she quickly evokes the sense of a comfortable family faced with an upheaval it will deal with.
Dialogue is terse, somewhat sketchy. The prose is spare to the point of being jarringly staccato. This is a book in a hurry, concerned with inner lives. For Paul in particular, confronting "an unimaginable state of self", his situation allows him self-discovery. Meanwhile his mother ponders her now ancient sin.
Each of the main characters is depicted in a mental state of controlled panic. The narrative voice is remote, characteristically detached; the formidable Gordimer has always been aloof. A genuinely tough writer, she is a hardened realist given neither to sentiment nor humour. She knows the world; more precisely, she knows how a life develops, how lives are lived. There are some wonderful touches, such as the portrayal of Primrose, the loyal black servant who keeps house for Paul's parents. Aware that they must tell her about their son's dangerous condition, ". . . the decision to send her away must not be seen as a banishment from her place in their lives but come about with her full understanding and acceptance as their duty to her safety".
Several times, particularly in her finest novels - written in the 1990s - such as My Son's Story, the outstanding None to Accompany Me and The Pickup, all written in what must be described as a late career, she has, for all her reserve, evoked powerful depths of feeling.
Paul's wife, Benni/Berenice, is a charming ad executive for whom the client is always right; morality is secondary. She will promote whatever the client is offering. The moral clash is so obvious it seems strange than Gordimer even bothered making it, yet she bends the polemic to suit the story of a marriage of complacent opposites that it takes a crisis to expose. Paul, as if clear-eyed for the first time, reassesses his wife and finds her morally lacking. In Gordimer's South Africa, as in her world, there are few heroes and not all that much sympathy.
Her point is that now blacks as well as whites are complicit in selling and destroying South Africa. Get a Life also looks at emotional greed in several manifestations. Gordimer cleverly looks beyond Paul, the stricken hero. In his mother Lyndsay, the portrait of the heroic mother prepared to risk herself in the care of her damaged child is undercut more by guilt than sacrifice. Apparently happily married to the easygoing Adrian (who had always wanted to be an archaeologist but instead supported her legal career), Lyndsay had had a long affair some 15 years earlier. Themes of atonement and forgiveness again fit in with the Biblical symbolism - an eye for an eye, a life for a life, a lie for a truth - that runs through the narrative, which is unforgiving, wise and curiously religious in its secularism.
Lyndsay is a powerful, if humanly flawed woman. It is she, not the men of the house, who goes out one night to confront a burglar. Her deception is more typical of a man and this fits in with the series of reversals Gordimer is attempting here. There are echoes of None to Accompany Me. The quasi-religious symbolism is further developed with the retribution that is exacted upon the confident Lyndsay.
Paul's illness acts as a metaphor for South Africa. Relentlessly, remorselessly, Gordimer unpicks the society in which her group of characters exists, just as she unpicks them, dismantling their securities and beliefs. Of course, most of them survive as do their respective worlds. But like Paul, nothing is all that healthy and Gordimer, always one to unsettle, ever the witness, offers no easy comfort.
Get a Life, By Nadine Gordimer, Bloomsbury, 187pp. £16.99
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
