Fiction: Passion and moral outrage have always been fundamental to the work of Nadine Gordimer. Although the politics of her native South Africa shaped her ferocious, often terrifying vision, for all the polemical intent she has never lost sight of the individual. This has sustained her. Yet political change has created new challenges for writers of protest, writers such as Gordimer, writes Eileen Battersby.
Fiction writers from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union asked themselves, "what will we write about when the old enemies have fallen?" This same question faced Gordimer, the veteran campaigner. Interestingly, it has been her, more noticeably than other writers of protest, who has confronted the chaos of a society in transition with energy and invention. While many writers, including those with greater lyric and artistic gifts than Gordimer, have faltered in the wake of losing the dynamic of fear that had fuelled their work, the dogged post-Apartheid Gordimer has produced some of her best work.
When she was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature, she was already an iconic figure, the author of A Guest of Honour, The Conservationist, Burger's Daughter and July's People. All very important, very powerful works. But the publication of My Son's Story in 1990, the year before the Nobel, marked a new development in her work. This was consolidated with None to Accompany Me in 1994. As with My Son's Story, it is one of her finest books - in between the publication of both was Jump, a short story collection.
It proved a significant work, even allowing for the fact that most of what Gordimer says is significant. It also made effective her own views of the form. "A short story occurs, in the imaginative sense. To write one is to try to express from a situation in the exterior or interior world the life-giving drop - sweat, tear, semen, saliva - that will spread an intensity on the page, burn a hole in it." She possesses an unsettling candour and treats the differences between men and women with the same interested detachment she brings to looking at black and white.
Sentimentality has never drawn her. She is tough and uncompromising, with a brisk humanity that has never been indifferent to romance. The House Gun (1998) continued her exploration of the new South Africa, a place where the rules had changed, the servant had become the master, a theme she had already considered as long ago as July's People which was published in 1981. She showed the new South Africa as a flawed Brave New World, and continued this portrayal in a subtle, unexpectedly moving novel, The Pickup (2001). In it she confirmed that her major theme is power, and its dangers, whether it is political power - or in the case of The Pickup, sexual.
And now, as a writer who has never lost her fascination in the individual, and in particular in the individual man or woman, she has crafted a strange collection of 10 pieces that read as variations of a life - or more accurately, variations on life experience. Loot is an odd book, like so many thoughts reflected through an imagination busily assessing, storing, speculating. The stories, which are curiously and deliberately open-ended, are about life: half life, possible life, end of life. There is a jaunty fatalism at work.
She is rarely the wittiest of writers, and it is here that a valid comparison may be made with Margaret Atwood, a writer with whom Gordimer has far more in common than might be suspected. Both Gordimer, born in 1923, and the Canadian, some 16 years her junior, have always maintained a futuristic pessimism based on their reading of history.
Atwood is funnier, more obviously blackly wry; yet Gordimer, neither a natural stylist nor comedian, responds to everything with a well-cultivated irony and a robust earthiness. She is shrewd and unshockable; people hold no mystery for her.
Throughout the stories in Loot, a collection which opens with the title piece, about as dark a fable on man and greed as could be imagined, lurks an awareness of the individual hoping and failing.
Few of the characters are noble or even obviously good; even fewer could be seen as brave. About the best that can be hoped for is the young Russian who is among several souls cast adrift in an extraordinarily free flowing composition, 'Karma'. In this long story, several narratives flow, each in turn like so many relay runners. The young Russian girl has been "saved" from life as a chambermaid by an Italian businessman who, having initially selected her as his sexual comfort for the duration of his hotel stay, then brings her back to Italy with him.
Having established her in accommodation for which he pays, he then sets about securing her future and his freedom by marrying her off to a wealthy, middle-aged bachelor. All continues in a bizarrely passive fashion until the girl visits a large farm and sees the way beef cattle are bred, housed in a shed, and fattened for slaughter. "Then she is led down the backs of the rows. Vast rumps, backsides touch the iron bars, hide streaked and plastered with the dung that falls into a trough like the one for food. The legs are stumps that function to hold up bulk." Their twilight world is sufficient to shock her into flight and a return to poverty. Elsewhere, characters either tell their own stories, or act as narrators, outlining the experiences of others. Gordimer is reaching after diversity, she wants as broad a social and sexual cross-section as possible. There is a sense of a chorus prepared to give its version of life as experienced by a number of members. Some work better than others.
In two of the more conventional stories, a single woman enjoys an unexpected belated taste of intimacy, while an older man sheds his wife for a young musician, much to the horror of his grown children. 'Mission Statement' is both fantasy romance and pragmatic moral - Roberta is given paradise and chooses escape. In another story a young white girl, abandoned as a baby in a church toilet and raised by a loving black couple, finds her chance of marriage denied because there are no official documents to support the biological facts of her life.
As a book, Loot is typically Gordimer: intelligent, open-eyed, candid and formidable. Whether speaking as a woman contemplating the pregnancy of her younger female partner, or of a young boy whose dangerous trick cycling allows him to face his own death in the shape of the truck about to crush him, or as the twin who lost his chance of life before birth, or a narrator calmly reporting the errors of judgment that render a character foolish or desperate, she is relentless. Cool, exact, and as unnerving to read as they were intended to be, these glimpses of life as lived unsettle and provoke, offer no easy reassurances - they're not meant to.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times.
Loot. By Nadine Gordimer, Bloomsbury, 237 pp, £16.99