The Conservationist
by Nadine Gordimer
Summary
Mehring is a wealthy white industrialist in South Africa who has bought a four hundred acre farm outside Johannesburg. He does not need it and does not work it. He comes at weekends, walks the land, feels proprietorial, and thinks of himself as a conservationist.
The body of an unidentified Black man is found in the reeds. The police are unhurried, decline to investigate, and the man is buried shallowly where he was found, without a name. Mehring returns to his weekends. The farm workers, who live there permanently, know exactly where he is.
Gordimer writes in a difficult, associative style that slides between Mehring's consciousness and the world around him without warning, and readers should expect to reread paragraphs. It is the least accessible of her novels and the one usually called her best.
The body will not stay down. That is the whole argument of the book, and when the floodwaters finally lift it back to the surface the meaning is unmistakable without ever being stated. Mehring's confidence in his ownership of the land, and of the country, is being quietly contradicted on every page by people he barely notices.
Slow, demanding and worth it. Not the place to start with Gordimer, but the place her admirers point to.
Around two hundred and fifty pages, and the difficulty is real rather than affected. Try Burger's Daughter or July's People first if you want an easier way in, then come back to this one, which Stephen Clingman has called her masterpiece.
Historical Context & Significance
The Conservationist shared the Booker Prize in 1974 with Stanley Middleton's Holiday, the first tie in the prize's history.
The circumstances were irregular. One of the judges, Elizabeth Jane Howard, was married to Kingsley Amis, who was on the shortlist for Ending Up, a conflict of interest that would not survive modern rules. The panel the panel resolved its deadlock by splitting the award.
Several of Gordimer's earlier books were banned under apartheid, and she treated censorship as a professional hazard rather than a surprise. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, the citation praising magnificent epic writing of very great benefit to humanity, and she remained in South Africa throughout, testifying in defence of accused ANC members during the 1986 Delmas treason trial.