Casting a cool eye on her country

In a Paris Review interview dating from 1979, South African writer Nadine Gordimer attributed the birth of her political consciousness to the year she spent in university as a mature student "of 21 or 22". It was also, she recalled, "the first time I'd mixed with blacks". It was there she discovered "everybody from Henry Miller to Upton Sinclair" and, looking back, added, "it was Sinclair's The Jungle that really started me thinking about politics: I thought, good God, these people who are exploited in a meat-packing factory - they're just like blacks here."

If this protected second daughter, born in 1923 to anxious white settlers in a small mining town in the Transvaal, had a relatively late political awakening, she has certainly more than made up for it since in a distinguished career which has spanned almost half the century and includes novels such as A Guest of Honour, The Conservationist, Burger's Daughter, July's People, My Son's Story, None to Accompany Me and The House Gun - as well as the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Gordimer personifies the writer as moral and political consciousness. It does no disservice to her to place her fiction at the heart of one of literature's ongoing debates - that of the good versus the important. While her gifted countryman, J.M. Coetzee, is deservedly regarded as one of the finest living novelists - a rare artist who, while appearing to maintain a distance between himself and politics, has consistently merged lyric art with political awareness - Gordimer has tended to write books that are important though not "great" art. Her style is minimal, her prose is often flat. But then, she has never played the artist in the tower, either. Gordimer's active involvement with the politics of her country has been as honest and courageous as is possible for anyone who has never sought elected office.

There is a characteristic practicality about this new collection of lectures and articles, many of them dating from this decade. Her anger is more irritable than passionate; she is not making grand statements for effect, she is offering truthful observation based on fact as clearly and as directly as she thinks - and Gordimer is a precise, formidable thinker. She is also, above all, an African, strongly aware that she does not speak any African language and that hers is in fact the tongue of the coloniser.

Logic is one of her many strengths. "South Africa raised an army to fight Nazism, which it did with distinction," she points out in `Our Century', a strong lecture delivered in 1995 and included in this book, "and the same brave white men and women under the command of Prime Minister General Smuts came back to practise racism contentedly at home." She then goes on to make a valid connection between the evils of Nazism and the system which supported white domination in her country. "Apartheid was an avatar of Nazism. The theories of racial superiority and most of the replusive and cruel ways of implementing them were the same in both regimes, except that instead of being perpetrated on Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals, in South Africa these were perpetrated on the majority of the population - who were not whiteskinned."

UNLIKE many writers, Gordimer reads the work of her contemporaries as well as the masters of the past. When giving the Charles Eliot Norton lecture series at Harvard in 1994, she devoted three of the six to the writing and being of Chinua Achebe, Amos Oz and Naguib Mahfouz. While she won an international audience early in her career, she has always actively campaigned on behalf of African writing - one of the most exciting and diverse literatures there is - in the most effective way a writer can: by urging readers to read them.

African writers feature strongly among the international writers of protest, those who have risked all to tell the truth. "Writers in Africa in the 20th century . . . have interpreted the greatest events of our continent since the abolition of slavery," she writes in `Turning the Page' and continues: "We have known that our task was to bring to our people's consciousness and that of the world the true dimensions of racism and colonialism beyond those that can be reached by the newspaper column and screen image, however valuable these may be. We have sought the fingerprint of flesh on history."

Politics and history are central to her commentaries. It is also important to note that most of the contents of this volume have been written to be delivered orally as addresses and lectures. True, her political and historical range of references must be acknowledged and expected, yet she is better than many writers at balancing her political views with her literary judgements. Cool and cerebral, Gordimer lives firmly in the present. She has been one of the first of the major writers of protest to confirm that, far from having lost her subject through the fall of apartheid, its aftermath continues to provide her with much to write about.

She has accepted the role of commentator with equal measures of pride and resignation. I remember, when interviewing her the year after she was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature, her remarking: "I'm not used to being asked about my novels - usually the questions are only about South Africa." Yet she sees herself primarily as a writer: "For myself, I have said that nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction."

Alongside powerful, cautionary, eloquent and impatient speeches about politics, change and new hope in the face of history's multiple horrors, is an excellent critical essay on the Central European writer Joseph Roth and the cultural diversity of the world he evokes, that of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. It is a piece to return to and celebrates Roth as a writer about whom, as a man, little is known. There is also a timely piece on this year's Nobel laureate, Gunter Grass, delivered two years ago to mark his 70th birthday. I found the inclusion of a stiff correspondence between herself and fellow Nobel Laureate, Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe, self-conscious and general rather than informative, but it is a small criticism. Living in Hope and History is one writer's testament, true to its sentiments as well as to Gordimer herself - an observer whose outrage has never compromised her intelligence, humanity and sense of justice.

Eileen Battersby is a critic and an Irish Times journalist