The House Gun by Nadine Gordimer Bloomsbury 294pp, £15.99 in UK
Long established as a serious writer whose worth resides in the importance of what she says rather than in any claims to narrative art, Nadine Gordimer has played a major role in the shaping of the literature of protest. Although she was a cowinner of the 1974 Booker Prize with The Conservationist, a subtle and strangely beautiful work with stylistic echoes of the fiction of J.M. Coetzee, several of Gordimer's most famous novels, such as Burger's Daughter (1979) and July's People (1981), succeed mainly because of the stark portrait they offer of South Africa as a society in turmoil.
In 1991, Gordimer won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the year after the publication of one of her best novels, My Son's Story (1990). Politics has often been a factor in the awarding of this honour. A courageous campaigner, she was not a surprising choice. Throughout her career she has demonstrated that the novel can be an effective polemical force. She is always an interesting writer, and a formidable essayist, but the content of her work has often had to compensate for her compressed, businesslike prose, which makes few concessions to style.
As is not the case with many Nobel literature laureates, Gor dimer's subsequent work, such as None to Accompany Me (1994), an austere study in self-containment, may prove to be her best. Certainly her new novel, The House Gun, shows a writer not only working at the height of her powers, but also one both aware of change and of the relevance of historical and cultural subtexts.
On the surface, the book is an intense courtroom thriller. A young man, Duncan Lingard, has committed murder - or has he? And if so, why? His white liberal parents, Harald and Claudia, are shocked. Comfortable professionals who have led protected lives within a violent society, these people have found things easy - until now. "It is probable that neither of the Lingards had ever been in a court before," we are told. Though characteristically cool and detached, Gordimer somehow evokes a tone of bewildered urgency. She presents the evidence, examines the circumstances of the killing and, above all, focuses on the impact the event has on the young man's parents.
Early in the narrative it becomes clear that the parents do not know their son - as a child he was swiftly despatched to a good boarding school. The reality of this parental distance is a historical fact that Claudia is anxious to change. She can't. Gordimer examines the respective dilemmas of an insurance executive father who retreats into books, and a mother whose work as a doctor has developed her compassion - if at a distance. Order has always been central to Claudia's existence. "The purpose of a doctor's life is to defend the body against the violence of pain. She stands on the other side of the divide from those who cause it. The divide of the ultimate, between death and life." She is presented as a good, if limited, literal-minded person.
One of the strengths of this book is the depth of characterisation, particularly as Gordimer - with one exception, the black defence attorney - has attempted to achieve this by limiting her characters to situations in which they are usually reacting to events and revelations rather than initiating action.
It is an extremely moral book, and the moral dimension is subtly achieved. A writer not known for her lightness of touch, Gordimer is deft here in both the handling of her characters and the narration of a story which is deliberately plotted - particularly since the outcome is never in doubt. Even so, she skilfully sustains suspense. The narrative is laden with metaphors of protection, security and imprisonment. The Lingards are careful, cautious individuals; they survive by being remote, and it is this remoteness which is now threatened by the exposure to publicity their son's crime has caused. Once Duncan was grown and independent of them, the couple exchanged their house for a residential complex. Again, the emphasis is on protection, a secure haven in the midst of a violent city.
Duncan has also been living in a complex of sorts. His choice is a communal life; the crime he has been charged with is the murder of a friend. The man was in fact his former lover, and Duncan had discovered him making love with his live-in girlfriend. As the facts emerge, the parents begin to come to know their son. There is never any doubt as to whether or not he killed the man. "This is not a detective story," Gordimer writes matter of factly. There is nothing haphazard about the murder weapon; in a society in which violent crime is routine, householders possess house guns as freely as they might a video. It is the communally-owned house gun which Duncan used.
Black/white relations and the reversals in these relationships and the various forms of need and mutual dependence are among the themes Gordimer is exploring. As Claudia works in her surgery she realises "she is no longer the one who doles out comfort or its placebos for others' disasters, herself safe, untouchable, in another class. And it's not the just laws that have brought about this form of equality; something quite other."
In July's People, Gordimer explored role reversal as a white family on the run from a civil war some time in the future become dependent on their black servant, who turns out to be their saviour. In The House Gun, the parents first learn of their son's crime when one of his friends, a black, calls to their apartment. This young man becomes a support for them. But their hopes come to rest entirely on the black Senior Counsel chosen to represent their son. Hamilton Motsamai is the personification of the new black professional created partly by outside influences - the photographs in his "well appointed chambers" show him with distinguished Gray's Inn colleagues in London - and by political change at home. "In his elegant grey suit, here is a man who has mastered everything, all the contradictions that were imposed upon him by the past." Arrogant, conceited and greatly taken with his role, Motsamai exudes "a new form of national sophistication", but Gordimer also makes sure that he emerges as a man who has not forgotten his tribal loyalties.
As already stated this is an extremely moral novel, and Gordimer skilfully dissects the multiple ambiguities of the law and of the way in which motives are interpreted and attributed. Motsamai, a risky but effective characterisation, is all-powerful, an actor who in another South Africa would have had to confine his theatricality to a pulpit. He appears to befriend, even adopt, the parents and pursues the erring girlfriend - the most guilty character in the book - with a streetwise tenacity. The ambiguities of the narrative are balanced by the shifts of tone, mood and perspectives. The crime is laid bare, as are the reasons for it. And the law wins.
In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of communism, some Eastern European writers voiced fears that the bringing about of political change could have the effect of destroying the source of their inspiration. When I asked her in 1993 did she fear such a phenomenon, Nadine Gordimer's response was emphatic: "No, absolutely not, life is always changing. Life continues, so will writing." The House Gun is compelling proof that as a writer she is continuing to examine life as lived as well as the essential, often distorted morality of that experience.