I had so much trouble with this book and it keeping my interest.

For for first time in a while I let expectation get the better of me. I was to read this piece for book club, and was finding it hard to track down, everywhere I went said they didn't have a copy but that the book was amazing.

So eventually when I found it there was quite a bit of anticipation...

Unfortunately my enjoyment fizzled, I really got into the story in the first few pages, then found myself getting lost in the lengthy passages. Conservationist was one of those books that made me feel dull, because I was struggling to follow what was going on (maybe I am dull, but I still think a book should be accessible)

The best part of this book I found where the paragraph interludes which (I think) expressed African mythology or parable.

This is not the kind of literature I enjoy. I had to force myself to finish it (and would have stopped early on except I was reading it as part of a challenge). There were two lines I particularly liked. "You think you've discovered the joys of simple living, but it's just that you've made enough money." "No one'll even remember where you're buried.". Otherwise, it meandered and blended, with run-on paragraphs and unmarked dialogue, almost like a stream of consciousness in book form.

If you've read Mantel's [b:Wolf Hall|6520929|Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell, #1)|Hilary Mantel|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1404136837s/6520929.jpg|6278354], you know there's a bit of adjustment at first once you realize "he" almost always refers to Cromwell because you're inside his head. Such is the case here, though the reader is granted a reprieve now and then when an omniscient voice takes over in some chapters. I say reprieve because it's tough being in Mehring's head and I felt relief when he engaged in dialogue (not that often) with someone other than himself.

Inside his head, the reader also needs to determine who the "you" is that Mehring is remembering and having imaginary conversations with. Mostly it's with his polar-opposite, leftist married lover (Mehring himself is divorced and seems to have had various flings, many unseemly) whom he's helped to flee the country, but at other times it's with his long-haired, barefoot sixteen-year-old hippie son Terry (the book was published in 1972). When they're together, Mehring struggles for topics to converse with Terry; when they're apart, Mehring thinks of the many things he should've said, but we all know how that goes: in your thoughts you control the other's responses. Mehring sometimes switches from one "you" to the other within the same paragraph; once the "you" has been established and sentences reread, meaning becomes easier.

Mehring is a rich white powerful industrialist who owns a luxury flat in the city and four-hundred acres in the country. He's spending more and more time in the country, a place he previously visited only on the weekends and originally envisioned as a love nest. He's become possessive of the land, though "his" black farm workers' abodes could do with some upgrading, of course:

With a new roof, it would be a better house than any of them has at the compound, but that's out of the question because he has discovered, coming there in the evenings, it has the best view of any spot on the whole farm.

The harshness of nature reaps danger (especially for those without resources) but also beauty, and Mehring believes the latter will always win out. This conservationist not only wants to keep his life (and land) the way it is, he increasingly wants it all for himself.

From the opening pages, he and the novel are haunted by the corpse of a murdered black man discovered in Mehring's third pasture. Not caring who committed the murder of a black man, the police bury the man near where he has been found. Mehring's anxious, claustrophobic (for the reader) thoughts return to the burial site over and over, as do thoughts of a missing ring, lost by his lover as she visited the property with him before he'd bought it.

The results of a flood brought on by a cyclone are described thoroughly and as I read those passages yesterday -- on the ninth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina -- the words rang true for my area too:

Hanks of grass, hanks of leaves and dead tree-limbs, hanks of slime, of sand, and always hanks of mud, have been currented this way and that by an extraordinary force that has rearranged a landscape as a petrified wake.

A good story, competently told, can’t be faulted. But ‘good’ is sometimes not enough. We might want more than that. We might want a story to carry an impact, not only on us but also on its own subject matter, the time it was set in, the land it describes, the politics of that time.
[b:The Conservationist|96337|The Conservationist|Nadine Gordimer|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348644337s/96337.jpg|1499841] carries such an impact. It hits us in the soft part of our bodies beneath the sternum, winding us, leaving us doubled in two, coughing and gasping. And it hits us early and often. There is no let-up. It hits our liberal notions as well as our conservative ones, our philanthropic impulses as well as our patronising ones. It questions the idea of land ownership and land use, confirming in the end that land belongs to those who live on it, and to those who lie in it after they are dead.

So not just competent but well told, this good story, well-told in every way. Gordimer’s words carry a visual quality so that the scenes play out before our eyes as if in a movie:
The shop was empty after Jacobus's clumsy shape sauntered out of the light of the door
Or this:
The house behind him was dark; on each window a sun, rouged with smoke and dust, slipped down the glass.
Or again:
He has tipped back the chair and feels the moonlight on his left cheek as if tanning in some strange sun.
More:
Dust has the effect on his distant hills of a pencil sketch gone over by a soft rubber

And yet the story is almost entirely one long interior monologue, thinking as a form of conversation, as the main character puts it. For much of the book, we are inside the roomy head of Mehring, a successful entrepreneur, a would-be farmer, a misguided conservationist, an old bull, always alone. Mehring has been the entitled predator of everything he came in contact with in his life and it really ought to be hell being inside Mehring’s head. But no, it’s more than comfortable; Mehring is not an alien. His thoughts are our thoughts even if in different contexts. And he is more honest than many of us.

In this book, the fortunate are those who get to lie in a field of shining lucerne by a flowing river for ever and ever. Others, just like the giant peace sign painted on the side of a water tank by a hopeful teenager, end up face-down in the mud on the side of a highway. Such is natural justice, and for all his faults, Mehring understands that message better than anyone.

.......................................................................................................

This book was written in the early seventies when John Vorster was prime minister of South Africa and the anti-apartheid movement had temporarily lost momentum; the book reflects the upheavals of that time perfectly. Gordimer herself resisted apartheid and all forms of discrimination and segregation throughout her life even refusing to accept being shortlisted for the Orange Prize, an award that recognizes only women writers. I cheered when I heard that.
I'm not recommending that you read this book; you readers all have your own agendas and I never seek to influence others. But I do want you to know that this shining book exists, and that it holds many, many truths beneath its layers. That’s enough.

Extremely well written, insightful and provoking. I had a very difficult time connecting to the characters though and found the pace a bit slow for my tastes. Would love to read this again with a group for the purposes of discussion.

"Yet while he listens, smiles exasperatedly into the telephone in his right hand, his other hand plays with himself the way a small boy seeks reassurance by touching his genitals - his fingers comb the damp springy hair, draw down the foreskin that has been pushed back during the shower, weigh the uneven balls, absently tender to the one that is smaller and lighter than the other."

This sentence exemplifies the style of The Conservationist: long, meandering sentences that can be a bit distracting but often deliver unexpected tangents, which stand out because they defy expectation and as a result provoke deeper analysis - what is that doing here? And why has it been placed here?

Within a paragraph, threads of thought interrupt one another, jumping without warning from a farmer's observations on jackals to the shape of a penis head. Lush, dreamy descriptions of the velt and vlei by the white protagonist conceal the rot beneath - the rot being literally and metaphorically the dead body of a nameless black man.

This novel is about Apartheid and the nature of South African society, but it isn't loudly hectoring in its politics, merely penetratingly observant. There is a plot, but it is utterly subservient to the style of the writing and the ideas the novel propounds.