A Nobel failure

Bloomsbury, 187pp, 16.99

THE NOBEL PRIZE CROWNS a literary career but it has been known to finish it. Certainly few winners, English-language ones anyway, write anything of great merit subsequently, Kipling and Faulkner being exceptions. Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel in 1991, and is now without question the Great Lady of South African writing; she hasn't been extinguished by the Prize, not quite anyway, which is to her credit.

On the other hand, one has always suspected that she was given the Nobel as much in recognition of her political stance, her admirable liberal opposition to the apartheid regime, as for purely literary reasons. Certainly her best novels - The Conservationist, Burger's Daughter and, perhaps, July's People - are good; but they are not great. Judging her simply as a novelist rather than as a political writer, I would put her somewhere in the second division, ranking her with, for example, Margaret Drabble or Iris Murdoch. Her novels are highly intelligent, admirably serious, and impeccably correct in attitude, but they don't sparkle. The magic is lacking.

Get a Life has merits. It is very carefully structured, if also surprisingly carelessly written, full of awkward sentences, syntactically clumsy, and not always making sense. The setting is South Africa today, a dozen or more years after apartheid crumbled, and Gordimer's observations of the social change experienced are always interesting and often acute. Yet the mechanism of the novel is rather crude, its oppositions journalistic.

The central figure, Paul, is an ecologist diagnosed with thyroid cancer, which is treated first with surgery, then radioactive iodine; this leaves him temporarily radioactive himself, and therefore a danger to others. He has to live in isolation, and because he and his wife Berenice, an advertising executive, have a small son, he lodges with his parents during the period of isolated recuperation.

Gordimer works hard with Paul, but quite fails to bring him to life. He remains an idea. But the opposites are clearly set up: between Paul's work and Berenice's, he a conservationist, she promoting the interests of the corporations that in the name of profit are ready to despoil the wastelands and wetlands of the world. This is just a bit crude.

Then again, as Paul lives out his personal Chernobyl - yes, it's so described - mainly in the garden of his parents' house, he is also occupied in trying to halt the project to build a nuclear reactor. Isn't this a bit obvious? Yes it is. And does Gordimer, in the best Guardian-liberal style, load the dice? Can you doubt it?

There are many good things in the novel. Unlike Paul and Berenice, who remain ideas rather than living characters, Paul's parents are convincingly done. There is vitality in the portrait of his colleague, Thalepo, and one could do with more of his sister Emma, whose e-mails sent from Brazil, have an individuality the worthy Paul entirely lacks.

The best passages in the book are mini-essays, pieces of social observation, but nothing in the novel is ever dramatised. Much is hindsight, and the movement of the narrative is hindered by the prose style, which contrives to be simultaneously leaden and pretentious. For example:

"For the first few moments there, eyelids alternately squeezing and lifting wide at the immersion in that benign illumination, of the sun, birds who ring like mobile phones. But there is no connection to be made between wild creatures, even the half-domesticated frequenters of the suburbs feeding on cultivated flowers, lawn worms, compost bugs, and the summons of technology."

This is terrible stuff. Nobody would have made that connection denied in the second sentence, if the author herself hadn't made it in the first. Throughout the novel there is the same straining for effect, and the same failure to achieve it. A disappointment on the whole. The curse of the Nobel still operates.