A story of racial divisions in South Africa, The Conservationist shared the Booker Prize in 1975 with Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

The story, told by a third-person objective narrator, opens with the arrival of Mehring, a successful South African businessman, at the large farm he owns where he spends his weekends. A divorced man whose one son has been sent to a boarding school, Mehring is the conservationist of the title, but the world that he is conserving is the one of privilege and inequity that apartheid created in South Africa.

On this weekend, the body of an anonymous murdered Bantu has been found dumped on the farm, but when Mehring summons the police he learns that no officer can attend to this matter until the next day. The neglected murdered man becomes an ominous symbol of the festering social strife in South Africa: it will cover the land with the stench of death, but whites in power are too busy to pay attention to it in a timely manner.

As the narrator gradually fills in the details of Mehring’s character, it becomes apparent that, without being overtly evil, his self-serving and self-centered choices and attitudes nonetheless give rise to human misery. Just as his relationship to his farm is a part-time affair chosen for the financial benefits and emotional satisfactions it will bring to him, so too his relationships with women are selfish exploitations that serve his needs only.

Having failed to establish a lasting connection in the human world, Mehring buys 400 acres of the physical world and keeps himself mostly separate from it. His Black employees, led by Jacobus, the real steward of the land, keep the empty house in perfect order, tend the cows and the crops, and survive the vagaries of fire and flood while Mehring extracts more wealth from the pig iron business, traveling all over the world in pursuit of it.

The novel features very little plot, allowing the cycle of life’s routines in a rural region to stand in for conflict and the complications that are usually associated with plot development. Instead, Gordimer delivers a richly detailed analysis of a character corrupted by the historical context that has produced him and that supports his life of excess by means of unending deficits in the lives of thousands of oppressed Africans enclosed in the “location”—the shantytown ringed with barbed wire fences 10 feet high—that Mehring must cross to reach his land.

Through a careful arrangement of characters who represent the racial tensions of South Africa—white defenders of a legacy of colonialism, descendants of Indian immigrants, and native Africans forced into near-slavery—Gordimer implicitly condemns the myopia of apartheid and the selfish apathy of the white minority who benefit from it.

Bibliography

Clingman, Stephen. The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside. 2nd ed. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.

Cooke, John. The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: Private Lives/Public Landscapes. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985.

King, Bruce, ed. The Later Fiction of Nadine Gordimer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

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