Do not let the sea of 3-stars fool you into decrying the unpleasantness or the apparent plotlessness of this novel. Not all of us read for pleasure after all. Besides it is an achievement of extraordinary proportions when an author manages to stretch the 'show don't tell' narrative device almost to the breaking point yet never failing to accentuate the core themes so realistically. Nadine Gordimer puts her reader in a trance-like state with her hypnotic, lyrical descriptions of minutiae in an unstable world which is perenially straddling the line of divide between outright revolution and a kind of perilous peace. She breathes so much life into the landscape that it manages to appear far more humanly than the protagonist who claims its ownership.There are discomfiting images galore seen through the eyes of Mehring, an opportunistic white farm-owner and businessman - hippos frolicking about in the murky waters of marshes who abort their foetuses sensing an impending drought, cows listlessly grazing about a farm peopled by inhabitants of different races and ambiguous allegiances, black children running about the veld snot dripping from their noses who are so carelessly mentioned in passing that they are taken to be closer in kinship with stray animals than humans, a dead body left to decay underneath water reeds by a lax administration, odious sexual encounters between strangers on a plane - which are potent enough to induce nausea in the reader and reinforce the unnaturalness of a South Africa under Apartheid. "They were useless against the possibility - always present - of a visit from some official, investigator, inspector: many titles that all amounted to the same thing: a white man with the right to serve an eviction order. [ ]...he came in the name of law, there was no defence to keep him out. He must not be antagonized: the only way was roundabout."The uncomfortable status quo which Mehring, his black workers and a group of Indians, who conduct business on the fringes of the farm, construct their lives around has much to do with the fact that Ms Gordimer wrote this at a time when the Anti-Apartheid movement had lost steam and its greatest hero was languishing in prison. Thus almost every impeccably crafted sentence is heavily impregnated with metaphors, allusions and analogies and so even a split second of lapse in attention can pose a crucial hindrance toward understanding.The violence and injustice that simmers just beneath the surface of the narrative is not just readily palpable but often threatens to spill over in to the realm of current reality.Mehring, a despicable man in every sense of the term, seems to be caught up in an existential crisis aside from being trapped in a prison of his own making. He is the perfect representative of a cog in the wheel of Apartheid, a white Capitalist who doesn't doubt the sanctity of a social order in which the Africans and Indians are placed on rungs significantly beneath the white man's and believes himself to be a benevolent and just 'master'. But even so he appears to be enveloped by a sense of growing unease and is keenly aware of a prickling reminder of his assured everyday existence being nothing more than a portentous lull before the storm.He is the titular conservationist of a contrived arrangement which is already starting to come apart at the seams and which will inevitably crumble to dust one day. But it is as if he almost knows his efforts at denial are futile which is why his inner world is thrown into a steadily deepening turmoil with each passing day. The proof of this can be found in Mehring's stream of consciousness degenerating into sporadic bursts of incoherence in the denouement.His downward spiral, thus, subtly alludes to the the chinks in the armour of the political establishment and augurs its future demise. "Yes, that's the deal, the hopeful reasoning of the impotence of your kind, of those who are powerless to establish their millenium. The only way to shut you up is to establish the other, the only millenium, of the body, invade you with the easy paradise that truly knows no distinction of colour, creed and what-not..."I find it a wee bit disheartening to notice so few readers picking up a Gordimer book these days. Not only is her Nobel win highly deserved in the light of all her literary activism in the backdrop of Apartheid but she nurtured an ambitious vision of dissecting the power imbalance in race relations from so many dissimilar points of view and brought it to fruition so masterfully. My reading of this couldn't have come at a more opportune time given South Africa is celebrating 20 years of democracy with the recent frenzy around its general elections. Here's to hoping interest in Ms Gordimer's work is revived on this momentous occasion.
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.
What do You think about The Conservationist (1983)?
The Conservationist is a literary exercise in unsettlement. When the body of a black man is found in Mehring's farm outside of Johannesburg, you realize that Gordimer is writing with a capacity for gruesome metaphor. There is the immediate symbolism of the body itself, or how the land was taken violently and how unease and resentment still lingers between White and Black. Mehring is an industrial magnate playing at farming and toting along his mistress - he pays the black farmhands to do the work for him. It is easy to take this book as a historical set-piece of apartheid South Africa, to see the distinctions between Rich Hedonist Elites and the working poor of all types - Boers, Indians, Africans. But Gordimer's writing always hints at something underneath, of Mehring's own emotional wounds and his inability to do anything about them, or perhaps the easy activism of his mistress and son still disguising their inactivity. It is perhaps comforting to say the right things, things which Mehring vaguely denies, but what is changed from it?This is a book which takes almost biblical affectation toward the landscape, and the farm itself is ruined and the body washes up again, almost in a 'death and resurrection' theme. Furthermore, the apparent difficulty of the book comes from Gordimer's ability to move in and out of Mehring's head - to take his own emotional turmoil and then move away to a more dispassionate perspective. Add to this long langorous depictions of the landscape and the locals, both slipping out of Mehring's fingers, and dashed conversations, and one finds a book of uncommon literary and emotional difficulty.
—Hadrian
tThe Conservationist is perhaps the subtlest Booker I’ve read thus far, and this is saying something; subtle storytelling seems to be a particularly admirable trait in the eyes of the Booker committees. In many ways, the real story of The Conservationist takes place around the edges of Mehring’s story – just as he tries to control the land but finds it growing apart from him and away from him, he can’t quite control his own story. He is never the true story, even of his own narrative. Apartheid rules his country; it is overwhelmed with state-sanctioned violence, a quiet and guerilla war simmering within a police state, poverty, and oppression; and out in the veld, Mehring buys a farm to avoid taxes and to find peace away from the city and his failed life (an ex-wife, a son who despises him, a mistress who has since dropped from view). And all this happens at best at the outskirts of Mehring’s narrative, of his farm, of his life. tThe book doesn’t ever talk about Apartheid, or racism, or Mehring’s role as a clearly influential man in the private sector of South Africa in the mid-1970s. Mehring purportedly seeks the quiet life – he revels in his days at his farm. But not only does he never truly learn how to get things to grow on the land he purported loves, but he seeks this quiet life by shunning everything around him, including his family; the world around him; and the people he passes. It is a deliberate indifference, most clearly illustrated by the black man, a stranger found dead on his property. Mehring treats him as an inconvenience, best cleared off by an indifferent and unwilling police department. The man is eventually buried on Mehring’s property by Mehring’s employees, who mourn the stranger’s life; and eventually the body reemerges with the rainy season. Mehring is haunted by this stranger’s body – and that, in itself, is telling: Mehring is haunted only by the body and not by the person who used to occupy that body, because Mehring did not quite seem to grasp that; just as he cannot quite grasp that his ownership of the land cannot quell the moral cross-claims that black South Africans – including those who tended his land – had to the farm and to the veld. Focused as he is on the life he wants to lead, he cannot see the role he plays in a larger and more troubled nation, even when its realities – unclaimed bodies; estranged sons; poverty along the road – seem impossible to ignore. And indeed they are, but for Mehring’s deliberate indifference, his willingness to pay the price (or have others pay it) of his desire to conserve himself and his land.tIt makes me realize, belatedly, that The Conservationist is an apt successor to Farrell’s books, though it is more subtle in its critique of Apartheid than Farrell was in its critique of colonialism. Each book, though, is told through the eyes of the non-sympathetic characters. If these characters attract your attention as the main attraction of the story, it soon becomes clear that the real story is what unfolds beyond the edges of that character’s world – what is shaped by and shapes the protagonist. tGordimer is not necessarily the easiest writer to read; The Conservationist jumps back and forth in time and memory, making it different to sort out the edges of memory or sort out a proper timeline of events and characters. She moves in and out of characters’ consciousnesses, often without warning; and she is not sparse in her imagery. But it is worth taking the time to find and follow her cadence. Once that triggers, it is easier to follow the characters and the story. It is worth the time it takes to fall into that pattern of her writing style.
—Courtney H.
This is a novel to admire, to tremble in sheer awe at the power of Gordimer's language, her mastery of sensuality, and the importance of its themes: the skewering of apartheid during a time when the anti-apartheid movement floundered, leaderless and without much will (early-mid 1970s). It is a tough novel to love. I felt alienated by the dense language and the stream-of-consciousness writing and frustration at being trapped inside Mehring's morally bankrupt brain. Which of course is the paradox of this brilliant, difficult novel: Mehring represents white South Africa and to see the world through his eyes, as we do in The Conservationist, is to trap the other characters--black, Indian, women--in a kind of subordinate, pitiful stasis. Nadine Gordimer deliberately holds us at arm's length as Mehring considers the human world around him, but draws us in close when showing us the land. Shortly after book opens on Mehring's country farm, twenty-five miles outside Johannesburg, the corpse of a black man is discovered by the river. No one knows who he is or how he died. The local authorities simply bury the man where he is, promising to collect the body later and investigate. Mehring is a bit put out at first, thinking of that dead body on his property, but after a while, the man troubles him much less than the hippos who abort their fetuses in the river, signs of a worsening drought. Mehring purchased this farm as a tax write-off and as a weekend fancy. It isn't terribly productive, but he doesn't need the income--he's a mining executive. The land and its cattle are tended by a collection of black families and undocumented workers who drift over from nearby shanty towns. Mehring holds dominion over so much land-conquering its underground during his day job; plucking at its veldt on the weekends. He is apolitical, bored, lonely, a beneficiary of a society built on the backs of the oppressed. His wife has left him, as has his mistress. His son flees to Namibia--a nation-state seeking independence from South Africa-- to escape compulsory military service. To keep himself company, Mehring flirts with sexual predation, all the while imagining himself above the cocktails-and-flirtations of South Africa's smart set. He really is despicable. God. But again, the genius of Gordimer is that you are inside Mehring's head, and of course he sees himself as enlightened and obliging--even a young girl sitting next to him on the plane opens her legs and allows his fingers inside. What was he supposed to do? Opportunity for the white man is everywhere, just for the taking.The land has the final say. Biblical rains and flood end Mehring's farm fancies. The flood returns the body of a slain man to the surface, to be buried properly. But it would take another twenty years after the publication of The Conservationist for the flood of public opinion and political will to end the shame of apartheid. The Conservationist won the Booker prize; it was also banned in South Africa. Rich in allegory, description, nuance, and psychology, it makes for disturbing, difficult reading.
—Julie
