Not only is she finely attuned to suffering by her Communist inheritance, but apartheid's very insistence on rigidly separating black misery from white privilege makes it impossible to maintain the illusion that everything is as it should be. Other people's suffering is never very far away in such a time and place. It reveals itself ceaselessly, in the form of decomposed bodies, strange neighbours, sudden arrests and large-scale outbreaks of violence.
But that was then, in the country of the past. The new South Africa may not be an egalitarian place, but it allows people of different races to work and play together. In Gordimer's new novel, Get a Life, we see the mixed environments of present-day Johannesburg, where the suburbs which were formerly dominated by Afrikaner civil servants and their cold churches have given way to something else:
Then it had become a place where all that had been clandestine, the mixing of blacks and whites, not necessarily the political activists who had won that freedom, was open. People in television, the theatre, advertising, journalism, and all the hangers-on of the arts and crafts, made it fashionable among themselves . . . . And in addition to rap and jazz bars and restaurants which gays or blacks favoured like clubs, vegetarians could find dishes to conform to different versions of their faith, mixed-race lovers were not something exotic confined to the new black upper class and their white partners patronizing elegant enclaves of the old white rich.
Johannesburg is like any other global metro-polis now; the politics of suffering no longer has to be kept at arm's length from the enjoyment of privilege.
Coexistence is the norm, which is why the marriage between Paul Bannerman and Berenice is possible in a way it could never have been before. Paul works as an ecologist, seeking to preserve the natural world from the predatory ventures of mining firms and tourism companies. Berenice is a senior advertising executive, counting as clients some of the very multinationals her husband pits his energies against. This division of labour leads to no major marital friction, no diverging of ways. There are no contradictions the contemporary world cannot accommodate.
Yet the novel begins with a separation after Paul has undergone radiation therapy for cancer. To avoid endangering Berenice and their son, Nicholas, he chooses to move in with his parents. The isolation makes Paul melancholy, while Nicholas is hurt by the sudden, unexplained separation from his father. But the bonds of family are more than equal to such a crisis. Paul's parents, Adrian and Lyndsay, handle the situation with tact and grace, each exhibiting a particular strength. Adrian is the nurturing male, retired from a corporate job that he took on in order to support his wife's nascent career. It is a happy marriage, with Lyndsay justifying her husband's faith. She is a successful civil-rights and constitutional lawyer, possessing an instinct for social justice that resembles Paul's engagement with the environment.
The first part of the novel, which describes Paul's exclusion and the reactions of the principal players, is efficient without being particularly engaging. The narrative picks up the rhythms of adjustment, lingering over Paul as he veers between melancholy and memories of childhood, between a faint resentment at his wife and worries about his environmental projects. The free indirect discourse Gordimer uses produces the occasional interesting image or thought, but there is something insubstantial about the characters, an effect heightened by the frequent plunges into telegraphic language: "Nights. The nuclear family, father mother son, is asleep in reconstitution, reduced by quarantine". Why should this world be so reduced, when it has suffered a far greater quarantine in its past? And what does Paul's illness signify, especially in the possible contamination he carries within him? It is hard to tell from Get a Life.
Although there is a muted but distinct correspondence between Paul's particular condition and his campaign to prevent a nuclear plant from being set up in the wilderness, illness here does not seem to be a symptom of being over-sensitive to other people's suffering. Paul's concern for the environment seems real enough, fleshed out further by the camaraderie he feels for his fellow campaigners Derek and Thapelo, but it comes to us too often in sentences constructed out of cliches and jargon: "A conventional developmental concept this time. Old as when the earliest agriculturists rolled stones into a stream to block its flow for themselves. Not the pebble-bed experiment descended from deadly alchemy of atoms that can achieve space fiction in reality".
