What was it all for?

What happens to a novelist who becomes the conscience of a nation? Nadine Gordimer, who is now 89 and whose writing career began in the 1940s, has represented the progressive white intelligentsia of South Africa through a large corpus of fiction and essays, exploring personal and political morality with passionate lucidity through the apartheid years and beyond. She has long been internationally admired, winning the Booker Prize with The Conservationist in 1974 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991.

This latest book, a study of the troubled state of her nation after apartheid, is outspoken and unflinching. Her courage and her moral stature are unquestionable; but as this novel demonstrates on every page, her distinction now appears to be more to do with content than style, and the message has come to count for more than literary skill.

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Even so, this is an important and highly topical book about how hard it is to sustain hope and idealism in the wake of a revolution. It revolves around one couple: Jabu, a black woman from a Christian Zulu family and Steve, a white South African whose mother was Jewish, have been together since meeting as students in the bush in Swaziland, on the run from the apartheid regime and dedicated heart and soul to the Struggle. He is an industrial chemist turned academic, who in the past made explosives for sabotage; she is a rising lawyer. Once lovers obliged to marry in secret, when the novel begins they are at last living openly in a rented flat with their baby daughter and starting to build a normal happy life together. Predictably, this is not so easy; there are awkward choices ahead.

Before long they surrender to bourgeois capitalism, buy a house and move to the Suburb, where they are surrounded by old comrades, black and white, with shared values and similar hopes.