Future Tense

By Paul Gray

JULY'S PEOPLE

by Nadine Gordimer

Viking; 160 pages; $10.95

This terse novel is set in a future that may be inevitable. Author Nadine Gordimer, 57, imagines a time when the blacks of her native South Africa finally move in force against the ruling white minority. The cities go up in flames, the airports and other routes of escape are cut off. People who probably did not belong in the country in the first place now find that they cannot get out at all.

Among them are Bamford and Maureen Smales, a liberal Johannesburg couple with three small children. As the rioting spreads, they turn to July, the black man who has been their servant for 15 years. He piles them into a van and guides them to his ancestral village, nearly 400 miles away. This "crash from the suburb to the wilderness" takes three torturous days and nights to accomplish.

Then difficulties begin in earnest. Although their children slip easily into the new, primitive surroundings, the parents find it hard to adjust to the "habitation of mud houses." Food is scarce, sanitation minimal, and disease threatens with every drink from the nearby river. They fear betrayal. July can apparently keep the members of his extended family quiet, but perhaps "he could not prevent other people, living scattered round about, who knew the look of every thornbush, from discovering there were thornbushes that overgrew a white man's car, and passing on that information to any black army patrol."

Hardest of all is their total dependence on July himself. They owe him their lives, yet the Smaleses find it galling that the servant has become their master. He insists on keeping the keys to the van; they do not want to trust him with this power over their fates. He still maintains the routine of serving them, bringing them tea in the morning and shopping for supplies; they wonder if this behavior is not reproachful, a way of setting them apart from the life of the village. The white wife cannot join the women in their daily routines, and her husband is powerless, "an architect lying on a bed in a mud hut, a man without a vehicle."

The fact that the Smaleses have supported black independence does not make their ordeal any easier. They fiddle constantly with a radio they salvaged from their home, hoping for news of some kindt expecting to hear the "burst of martial music" that will announce the final success of the revolution. Their principles and fears are at cross-purposes. They know which side is right, and they also know that it is the one that will assuredly kill them: "They had fled the fighting in the streets, the danger for their children, the necessity to defend their lives in the name of ideals they didn't share in a destroyed white society they didn't believe in." Whatever happens, the Smaleses cannot go home again.

Apocalyptic fiction poses certain problems. The demands of imagining and then recording monumental events can push novelists into generalizations; the bigger the picture, the more abstract and bloodless the language is likely to become. Gordimer avoids this danger by concentrating on domestic upheaval within a single family. As South Africa changes utterly in the background, a husband and wife must cope with a life for which they are unprepared. He finds himself suddenly without authority, while she learns that security is a thing of the past. They bicker, each blaming the other for not having packed up and left while there was still time. She discovers that even the civilized act of reading is impossible: "No fiction could compete with what she was finding she did not know, could not have imagined or discovered through imagination.

July's People is Gordimer's eighth novel and her bleakest look at the racial problem in South Africa. Yet her vision breaks through the color barrier to encompass both sides. She shows how individual acts of kindness can override institutional injustice, how people pushed to extremes can reach out as well as strike back. She does not minimize the gulf that separates whites and blacks in her homeland; the Smales family may be July's people in the village, but he and they remain separated by heritage and the history of colonialism. In portraying once again a struggle that is literally black and white, Gordimer paints all the subtle gradations in between.

--By Paul Gray

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