The Conservationist

Mehring and the Farm

Mehring is a man who buys things to have them. The farm outside Johannesburg is not an agricultural project or a retirement plan; it is an acquisition, a piece of land that he owns on weekends, that gives him a version of himself—the gentleman farmer, the man of the land—that his weekday life as an industrialist cannot provide. He is not sentimental about the farm; he is possessive of it. The distinction is important.

Gordimer builds the farm sections of the novel in a mode that is almost lyrical—the land’s seasonal rhythms, the animal life, the workers who actually know how to farm it—against which Mehring’s relationship to the property is revealed as pure abstraction. He owns it in the legal sense; the farm workers know it in the bodily sense, the way that people who have worked land for generations know it. The gap between these two forms of knowing is what the novel is about.

The farm workers are a presence that Gordimer sketches with careful restraint—their names, their daily routines, their relationships with each other and with the land, their relationship with Mehring, which is one of performed deference that both sides understand without discussing. The workers know things about the farm that Mehring does not know and cannot learn, because what they know is knowledge acquired through sustained physical engagement with the land, not through the abstract mechanism of a title deed.

The Body

An unnamed Black man is found dead on Mehring’s farm, buried hastily in one of the fields. The police investigation is cursory—a dead Black man on a white man’s farm in apartheid South Africa in the 1970s is not a matter of sustained official interest. The body is buried, the case is closed, and Mehring is expected to simply own the field over the body, which is what the law permits him to do.

But the body does not cooperate. It becomes the novel’s center of gravity—mentioned in passing, returned to, noticed in the soil, present in the rhythm of the farm in a way that legal burial has not resolved. The workers know it is there; the seasonal flooding brings it closer to the surface; the land itself seems to register the presence of the unacknowledged dead in ways that Gordimer describes with a precision that is partly naturalistic and partly ceremonial.

As the novel progresses, the body accumulates meaning. It is not just a dead man; it is the claim of the dispossessed on the land—the African dead who are under every farm in South Africa, under every suburban garden, under the foundations of every city that European settlement built on African soil. The body cannot be permanently buried because the claim it represents cannot be permanently buried: it is the prior claim, the original claim, the claim that European law overrode but did not extinguish.

The Land’s Claim

The Conservationist is Gordimer’s most explicitly allegorical novel, and the allegory is drawn from Zulu oral tradition as well as from the political history of South Africa. The final scene—in which the flooding and the farm workers’ ritual combine to bring the body above ground, and the workers bury him properly, with ceremony, claiming him as their own—is the novel’s argument in its most condensed form: the land returns its dead to those who truly know it, not to those who merely own it.

Mehring himself disintegrates across the novel—his personal life unravels, his relationship with his son becomes impossible, his grip on the various identities he has purchased (businessman, farmer, liberal, lover) loosens. The disintegration mirrors the body’s insistence: as the anonymous dead man rises, Mehring sinks. The conservationist who owns the land cannot conserve himself, because what he is trying to conserve is a form of possession that history has already decided is temporary.

The Booker Prize in 1974 (shared with Stanley Middleton’s Holiday) recognized the novel’s literary ambition. It remains Gordimer’s most formally demanding work—the prose is fragmented, non-linear, and elliptical in ways that reward close reading and resist summary. It is also her most politically fundamental: below the apartheid critique is a deeper argument about the nature of land and belonging that applies wherever European colonialism claimed permanent ownership of African soil.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Gordimer’s most formally demanding and symbolically dense novel: the Booker Prize winner that is her most enduring literary achievement, though not her easiest.