Within four years of publishing what may prove her best novel, None to Accompany Me, with this novel the 1991 Nobel Laureate confirmed that the changing situation in South Africa has not left her lacking a direction. This intense, carefully plotted courtroom thriller is about far more than investigating the crime. Harald and Claudia are complacent white liberal South Africans. Their lives are ordered and protected within what remains a violent society. Everything they believe in is challenged when their only son is charged with murder. It soon becomes obvious that the couple do not know this son who was despatched to boarding school without ever imposing himself on their respective routine. Gordimer's portrait of the couple, particularly the wife, confronting her failures as a mother, is well drawn. But the triumph of this extremely moral work is the uneasy dependency which the couple develop towards their theatrical black lawyer, himself an ambivalent symbol of the new South Africa caught between old roles and new status.
Eileen Battersby