Nadine Gordimer The Conservationist (1974)

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.

The Conservationist is a novel about apartheid, that isn’t explicitly political.  It makes a powerful statement against apartheid without directly condemning it; every word drips with anger at the injustice of the suffering of the marginalised Black South African characters, who are clearly metaphors for the Black South African community as a whole.  But these appear to be almost incidental compared to the size and power of the South African landscape, which is the true star of Gordimer’s novel.  This is a majestic paean to the rapidly changing South African countryside; a brilliant work that, while calling for change in its unjust politics, evokes a geographical location that truly deserves to be conserved.