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.
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.
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