The 1974 Booker Prize was the first to be awarded to two
novels jointly; Nadine Gordimer’s The
Conservationist is the first of the two that I have read. The novel’s title is interesting, in
that Mehring, Gordimer’s white South African farm owner protagonist, would
almost certainly not consider himself to be a conservationist, in the environmental sense. At times boorish
and misogynistic, Mehring is absolutely opposed to any changes in the status
quo of apartheid South African political organisation and attempts to keep everything
on his farm running smoothly by keeping firm control over his Black workforce. Mehring can be said to be Gordimer’s
personification of what was fundamentally wrong with the South African state at
the time that she wrote the novel; a privileged businessman, who owns and runs
a farm which he only visits at weekends, yet expects to be able to keep it
fully under control.
However this is too simplistic an assessment; Gordimer imbues Mehring with a real love for the land that he owns and she
conveys this through the frequent paragraphs where Mehring contemplates the breathtaking
beauty of the environment that surrounds him.
Mehring knows that his farm is neither particularly profitable nor productive,
yet he keeps coming back to it because he is beguiled by its setting. There are frequent allusions as to why
Mehring bought the farm; it was intended to be a secret love-nest for him and
the married woman who he was having an affair with at the time. The woman is never named, and it is hinted
that their relationship was brief, yet Mehring’s thoughts frequently return to
the occasion when she came with him to look over the farm before he purchased it. Her refrain “I’d leave it all just as it is”
seems to haunt Mehring, and it is arguably this more than anything that makes him
the conservationist of the novel’s title.
With the woman long gone, Mehring seems to only gain
satisfaction from his relationship with his farm. He finds his other human relationships wanting;
his ex-wife in America is a pest, his (implied) gay son is a disappointment to
him and he retreats further and further from his circle of fellow businessmen
friends and their families as he seeks to avoid their company. Mehring is seemingly haunted by this one
conquest, although she is not the only one by any means; Gordimer portrays him
as a suburban lothario, who also has an unhealthy interest in teenage girls.
This interest is systematic of what Gordimer intends the
novel to represent on a macrocosmic level.
Mehring takes what he wants, without thinking through the consequences
or of the damage he does, and this can be said to be representative of the
South African state at the time. On a
couple of occasions Mehring appears to get caught out, but Gordimer’s stream-of-consciousness
third person prose, lacking in quotation marks when characters speak, makes some
of these episodes difficult to understand.
Perhaps Gordimer intended these revelations of discovery to be deliberately
ambiguous but I did find them very hard to follow. Although this makes the novel flow in a
naturalistic way between prose and dialogue, the ensuing lack of clarity for me
is the one flaw in what is otherwise a beautiful novel.
Mehring’s relationship with his Black African members of
staff seems to be relatively neutral.
Although he doesn’t help them to achieve emancipation, he doesn’t treat
them badly either. He recognises that
staff like Jacobus work hard for the farm, even if they sometimes take small
liberties while he is away. Gordimer
makes it clear that she does not support the Blacks’ impoverished and inferior
state (one particular passage concerning a Christmas coupon is particularly poignant)
but she doesn’t use Mehring as a means of enforcing this system upon them; rather
she criticises the political system itself, in the form of shadowy references
to the police and what they do to Blacks who don’t possess the appropriate
papers.
