The Conservationist

Mehring is a South African industrialist who has bought a farm outside Johannesburg as a weekend indulgence and a tax arrangement, and who has begun, to his own faint surprise, to care about it. He walks his land, notes the willows and the reeds, disapproves of his neighbours' methods, and thinks with satisfaction that he is conserving something. He is also unable to hold on to anything else: his ex-wife despises him, his son is drifting left and away, his mistress has left the country over her politics. Then the body of a Black man is found in the third pasture, and the police, having no interest in the matter, bury it shallowly on the spot. It does not stay buried. Gordimer writes in a dense interior third person, sliding between Mehring's self-satisfied reverie and the lives of the Black families in the compound whose presence on the land long predates his purchase, and the novel is built around the slow, patient pressure of an unnamed corpse on a man who believes he owns the ground. Its argument about who the land belongs to is made almost entirely by weather, water and rot.