South African tale of guilt and love
The House Gun by Nadine Gordimer, Bloomsbury, $270 Harald, a respected insurance executive, and Claudia, his doctor wife, learn that their son, Duncan, has murdered someone in cold blood.
The bullet shatters their privileged colonial existence in post-apartheid South Africa, a place Nobel Prize-winning author Nadine Gordimer said last year seemed to have been erupting in violence and sexual abuse since 1994. The thought 'deeply disturbed' her and this book seems to be her response.
Its plot revolves around the triangle of the parents and their son and examines life in a New World where victims of state violence under the old regime had been habituated to it. 'People had forgotten there was any other way.' The 75-year-old Gordimer is widely regarded as one of the most influential women in the literary world, and Nelson Mandela's South Africa remains hip. Combine that with the fact that the book works as a tense moral drama and the result is Granada Productions (which made the film My Left Foot ) buying the film rights for US$200,000 (HK$1.55 million).
The role of flamboyant Senior Counsel Hamilton Motsamai, a talented black lawyer and a returned exile, could have been tailor-made for Forrest Whitaker of The Crying Game, who is reportedly interested.
Motsamai is the man on whom Harald and Claudia must reluctantly depend as their lives are turned upside down and the murder charge plunges both of them into a crisis of faith.
Gordimer has always been fascinated by the idea that you never really know anyone. And flexible notions of morality are also a common theme. The House Gun probes the long-married couple's shifting attitudes to what has happened, taking them from an attempt to impose order on chaos - how do you arrange the chairs when someone is coming to explain why your son murdered his former boyfriend? - to open hostility towards each other about how Duncan has turned out, and finally, to clinging together when they realise they want to reject their son.
Early on, Gordimer banishes any romantic idea that Duncan might be innocent: he confesses, though he does not explain. Her stark, opinionated narrative leaves no room for thinking his actions could have been justified.
That this grave but fascinating book is based upon such a full confession of the truth is quite a change for a novelist who once said that the society she wrote about was based upon a lie.
After a life of relative ease, Harald and Claudia are forced to answer some hard questions and to realise how far their lives are still bound up with the old regime and its extreme, painful times.
They must learn, in the new South Africa, how to deal with the conditioning, self-censorship and paralysis of old regime, their guilt and their continuing prejudice.
What leavens the sombre subject of the book is Gordimer's unquenchable hope for humanity. Though The House Gun is dominated by a crime, she has produced a book about a driving desire for reconciliation that is, in fact, an act of love.
