BOOKS

Issues, not personalities

Barbara Trapido

THE HOUSE GUN by Nadine Gardimer Bloomsbury, £15.99, pp. 294 This his is the story of a domestic murder, a crime passionel, but, like all Gordimer's fictions, it is more concerned with documenting the nuance of racial politics in South Africa than with the transfiguring art of the storyteller. Thus, while the emotions are strangely unreal, the contem- porary detail is recorded with all the authenticity of Titanic. And, while the accused, the self-confessed murderer, is never in any danger of being hanged, his father sees fit to sit through a chapter- length session of the new Constitutional Court as it debates the abolition of the death sentence, complete with a recognis- able cast of real-life, new South African Judges. At a Saturday night house party, the same unfortunate parent is !objected to a run of lectures, masquerad- ing as dialogue, on the history of the Bantu Education policy and the changing nature of the Landbank.

The House Gun is the story of middle- aged Harald and Claudia, he the director of an insurance company now involved in low-cost housing projects for blacks, she a hospital doctor who does a weekly stint at a community clinic. Their stable, moderately do-gooding lives in their new, security- monitored townhouse are invaded — one cannot say shattered— one evening by the news that their son Duncan, their only child, a carefully educated young architect, has been arrested for murder. The charge is not denied and bail is refused. The cir- cumstances of the murder are soon revealed. Duncan, pushed to breaking point by a taunting, malevolent alliance struck between his former male lover and his unbalanced, poisonous girlfriend, picks up the 'house gun' which has been careless- ly left out on a drinks table after a party -- ,a gun owned communally by him and his housemates for purposes of self-defence m a climate of escalating violence — and Points it at the talking head of the male abuser. He does so in a moment of emo- tional and mental blackout.

One might reasonably expect such a story — surely the stuff of parental night- mares — to have the reader's heart in his Mouth, but with a certain spoilsport perver- sity Gordimer chooses to dampen down the drama almost at once and informs her audience that this is no 'whodunnit' ; this is no 'cheap detective yarn'. (In your dreams, dear reader.) We are given almost no access to Duncan and his friends and, instead, find ourselves trapped within Harald and Claudia's heads as they ruminate on their situation, usually while device) the journey by car (central locking uevice) to and from the prison where Duncan is being held, pending his trial — a trial which begins only on page 182.

Perhaps it is the burden of the story's inactivity that induces some of the convo- luted prose that Gordimer usually reserves for her works of non-fiction. Here, for example, is a parental musing upon the youthful passion which led to Duncan's conception:

What was so enthralling about the mating, what was the compulsive attraction of the partner is something that not only changes perspective from the view of what is revealed about one another as each becomes known over the years, but also reveals something else, that was there at the time, to be seen, and wasn't.

This extraordinary prose tendency is made the more trying by the fact that what Harald and Claudia say, either in interior monologue or to each other, or what constitute the authorial asides on their behalf, are all rolled into one. None of it is indicated by quotation marks, tenses switch mid-sentence and singulars and plurals crash together in frequent disagreement. Gordimer tells us it 'doesn't matter whose thoughts these were', and she often refers to the couple as 'he/she'.

Yet Harald and Claudia are, supposedly, very different. Theirs is a passionate relationship, Gordimer tells us — though they belie this (he/she?) by the use of some dauntingly unsexy and biologically dubious terminology at times. Claudia, for example, has 'carried the foetus he had implanted when she was 19'. They have come together through different beliefs and backgrounds. Harald is a practising Catholic and Claudia an unbeliever. His major influence is the 'Jesuits', hers `Freud'. But they are neither of them remotely Jesuitical nor Freudian. Harald `takes communion' once a week and sounds suspiciously like a golf-club C of E. And, while Gordimer appears, in the interests of research, to have visited Harald's inner-city church, whose ethnic and social variety she catalogues in some detail, she neither knows nor cares about how his religion might drive him at moments of crisis.

Claudia refers insistently to Duncan's happy childhood. .

As a little boy, he was happy at school, at home,, was he ever aggressive, did he confide in me. Of course he was happy!

A reader might suspect that, to the average Freudian, childhood is never 'happy' in any facile sense; that, contrariwise, it is a mine- field of emotions, an unmanageable mix of omnipotent wish-fulfilment, murderous inclinations and feelings of chafing power- lessness. After a while, one simply ceases to believe that Claudia is a doctor. Here she is reflecting on the discovery that her son has had a homosexual affair: •

He could have experimented at school. In boys' schools it's difficult to resist. But . . at a school like his, first sex would be with girls. There were enough girls available . . . Girls would have been on the pill already, then, wouldn't they?

Does Claudia, the community health medic, not know for whom she prescribes these pills? Does Gordimer herself believe that all well brought up schoolgirls in select private establishments like Duncan's old school are routinely taking birth control pills? Does she actually know any teenage girls?

Harald, we are told, is a great reader. He makes reference to insights into the human condition culled from Dostoevsky and Thomas Mann, yet Gordimer never allows Harald and Claudia to descend into the dark, terrifying spaces that these authors' characters occupy. Instead, they watch a Woody Allen movie and calmly debate the nature of sin and whether or not murder is the only ultimate sin, and whether Harald's shares in a tobacco company rate highly in the hierarchy of sins. While even the disinterested reader, who has been kept from any closeness with Duncan, understands that the murder is committed in circumstances of dire provocation, his parents do not root for him. They stump up the money for his defence. They have a commitment to him dating from an assurance given to him at school. Yet they find the phrase 'get him off' too vulgar; they are 'repulsed' by him. 'Why,' Claudia says, 'did he take on a kind of life, a range of emotions he just isn't equal to?' They search Duncan's impeccable early life for possible landmarks on the road to violence and come up with an occasion when an older child at his boarding-school commit- ted suicide by hanging himself. They dis- cuss whether Duncan was 'spat' by reference to notions of toilet training.

In short, it is difficult to avoid the impression that Gordimer is short-changing these people, perhaps in order to hang on them the currently perceived inadequacies of the group they represent, namely, white liberals. Curiously, it is this group, who for decades defied, or at least detested, the apartheid state, and who took a stand on principle for racial equality, human rights and academic freedom — it is this group who have become the current demons, while the new, rising black middle class makes bedfellows of yesterday's white racists. Here is Gordimer, in a telling aside, on Claudia's response to the news that her son has appointed a black defence lawyer:

She's not one of those doctors who touch black skin along with white in their work but retain liberal prejudices against the intellec- tual capacities of blacks ...

Liberal prejudices? Given the gamut of white racist bigots in that country, these are weasel words, crowd-pleasing words. They leave a bad taste. Naturally, this novel is not without its moments. The crazy, poisonous girlfriend is rather good at the trial. Duncan's black Senior Counsel, along with his young Zulu journalist friend, occa- sionally crackle with real presence. There is the odd flash of fine descriptive writing —the eye of the midday sun, the content of the prison library — but, in the end, so what? This is a mean-spirited and not very important book. Go and read a nice whodunnit.