The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer

Change the world but keep bits of it the way I like it for myself--who wouldn't make the world over if it were to be as easy as that. To keep anything the way you like it for yourself you have to have the stomach to ignore--dead and hidden--whatever intrudes. Those for whom life is cheapest recognize that. Up at the compound, Jacobus and his crowd. The thousands in that location. Face down under the mud somewhere, and cows trample and drop their pats overhead, the dry reeds have fallen like rushes strewn to cover, it's all as you said when you suggested: Why not just leave it as it is?

The Conservationist begins with a body. An unknown black man is found in one of the pastures of the farm belonging to Mehring, a wealthy businessman in the metal industry. Mehring's hard-working foreman Jacobus discovers the body, but it's the Boer police who respond by burying the man in Mehring's pasture, supposedly until they can come get it later, but they never do.

Mehring is a "master of the universe" type--a man whose wealth is so large he can do basically whatever he wants. He has bought the farm principally as a love nest, but also to scratch a kind of itch that only the rich who live lightly on the land can have. His wife has left him and moved to America, his son doesn't want to come home, and his mistress, a leftist radical, has fled to Namibia. Mehring can fly to Japan at a moment's notice on the flimsiest of pretexts, but he has no home in South Africa the way that Jacobus and the rest of his crew do.

Even as he buys it, he knows the farm will fail to grant him any kind of meaningful tenure on the land--like the protagonists of July's People and Burger's Daughter, Mehring has an instinctive sense that the time of white supremacy in South Africa is close to an end, and he will soon be dispossessed. So it's no surprise that the farm seems to refuse his attempts to cultivate it. Fire breaks out, then a flood, and at the end of the book the body of the dead man, the symbol of the trauma that will not remain hidden forever, floats up through the mud to the surface. At the end, while Mehring imagines his own death, unloved and unremembered, Jacobus and the others rebury the murdered man--a stranger, but a black stranger--in a ceremony of remembrance and love. In doing so they make it clear that no matter whose name is on the deed, the farm belongs truly to them.

The Conservationist is a bit more experimental than the other novel's I've read of Gordimer's. Mehring's sections are mostly stream-of-consciousness, hopping from one thought to another and dismissive of chronological time (when does the mistress flee back to Namibia, exactly?). It works, especially as an image of a man who has everything but cannot escape the insecurity of his own inner world. But I much preferred the straightforward sections among Jacobus and the other workers on the farm, or the Indian shopowners along the country street, whose stories are told with a working-class realism that contrasts the rootlessness and aimlessness of Mehring's narrative.

Like July's People and Burger's Daughter, The Conservationist is deeply skeptical about any kind of racial reconciliation in South Africa. None of these books present an image of white, colored, and black South Africans being able to communicate with each other in a meaningful way, and each has a kind of apocalyptic vision of a South Africa that is reclaimed by indigenous people, probably violently. Of course, Gordimer lived well into the 21st century and wrote several books after the end of apartheid. I'm very curious to read one of those books--did Gordimer still believe in the revolution to come? Who's in the helicopter at the end of July's People--and does Mehring ever get chased off "his" farm?