The slightly breathless, up-to-the-minute references to international events can seem like a narrative short-cut, but they establish the point about a globalized world. Within her miniature scale -the small cast of characters, the brief time-span of the events, and the stripped, coded prose -Gordimer has drawn the connections that exist between ecological systems deep inside Africa and a predatory Australian company, between a Norwegian guide and a South African man. This in itself is interesting: that she should choose to resist turning the sprawl of globalization into a mimetic principle, avoiding the path taken by the vast novels of David Mitchell (who does them well) and Salman Rushdie (who does them badly).

In her essay, "Living on a Frontierless Land: Cultural Globalization"(1999), Nadine Gordimer makes a distinction between the globalization of culture and the globalization of trade. Cultural globalization, she writes, allows the local to retain its integrity; the absence of frontiers, in its case, does not mean homogeneity. This is the point of the ecological thrust of the novel, it seems, to pose the uniqueness of the wetlands against the artificial universality that assumes everything can go together easily -advertising and environmentalism, tourist resorts and wildlife. One wishes Gordimer had addressed this at greater length, in a novel less mechanical about language and character. But in her exploration of the relationship between the longue duree of the natural world and the short history of the middle class, she reveals herself as a writer alert to the contemporary. This new novel is a minor addition to an impressive body of work produced over the decades, but it cannot be faulted for being blind to the changes of our time.