Gordimer has written a political testament in her Guest of Honor it is a long, spacious, comprehensive work of fiction. It has all the lineaments of a traditional story. It is leisurely and detailed in narrative, and melodramatic in its ending. It is exhaustive and superbly successful in its evocation of landscape and background. There is no denying the fact it lacks the restless energy and off-beat psychological probing of much current fiction. In fact, there is something Olympian, something magnificently confident in the way in which this South African writer goes about her work. Her calm certainty camouflages the ease with which she handles the many strands in her story and the involved relationships of her plot.
A Guest of Honor a perceptive and a persuasive political novel that challenges history itself. It is political work in that the major figures think and act in the light of their politics. It is free of that romantic and sentimental softness that made Robert Bolt's A man for All Seasons and Jean Anouilh's Becket such conspicuous failures. As in Malraux's Man's Fate, and Koestler's Darkness at Noon, the fascination of the book derives from the dialectical play of its ideas. Our sympathy for her people is directly proportional to the appeal of their arguments. There are no deliberate scoundrels in it, only powerful truths testing to see whether their hour is come.
Her theme is a classic one: the destruction of revolutionary ideals once the revolution has been effected; the throttling of those who want the social revolution to be an essential part of the political one; the dilemma of the outmaneuvered who see no course except to revolt against the revolution they helped bring about. It is a theme old in history and as recent as the new African states in which her novel is set.
Evelyn James Bray is the central character and has a curious history. A British colonial administrator, Bray was nevertheless actively involved in the freedom movement of the blacks. Now at the hour of independence, he is invited back by the newly chosen president of the newly established republic.
Adamson Mwete, a flamboyant and popular leader is the President and as a symbol of reawakened Africa, moves literally from the tin-roofed shack that was his home to the presidential palace and moves his attention from the individual to the concerns of the state. Bray notices that Edward Shinza, the man who had worked in harness with Mwete in securing freedom for the colony, is missing. He was both a finely drawn intellectual and a practical organizer, a reasoning man and theorist and yet one willing to do the spade work that others take credit for. Bray learns that independence, far from bringing the men together in a time of triumph, has only widened the gap between them. Mwete lives in colonial splendor; Shinza retreats to the bush, to the same scrubby conditions he endured before.
This is the outward show of differences that are crucial and fundamental. Mwete wants progress for the country, not for any segment within it. Shinza wants to improve the lives of the people. The president, for example, has concluded a contract with foreign-owned mining companies that gives a larger share of profits to the state, but keeps the wages of the miners at the same level.
The agitation of the miners stirs the trade unions and the leaders who control them. Once these unions had been part of the popular movement for independence without losing their function as vehicles for the grievances of the workers. Now the president wants them to become enforcement agencies to keep the workers in place.
The old independence party becomes a para-military organization to implement the decision of the head of state. A repressive detention law is passed. Men of wealth retain their privileges, and slowly the new republic becomes one with the empire. The poor farmer, the wage-earner in the fish-drying plant can hardly distinguish the new order from the old. The logicevents does not stop there. Men and movements are pushed into a convulsion of violence and terror, and in a final irony, the president turns to Britain, the country he ousted, to send troops to maintain the state it has just freed.
Such a summary may seem to reduce her characters to robots in history. They are, on the contrary, exceedingly human: complicated, erring, and driven by fleshy appetites and by the loftiest resolves. And they are a varied lot: fearful Indians afraid of joining either side; petty officials who want to stay out of the conflict; white settlers waiting for their opportunity; innocents caught up by winds of change. And all move in a landscape so tactile and so sensuous that it becomes a participant in everything that occurs. History takes on human attributes in this mature, fully realized work. Whether we want to or not we are forced to take sides between those who want to ride the current and those who want to alter it. It is so real that you feel yourself to be a part of it. Dr. Bikram Lamba, an international management consultant is Chairman & Managin Director of Tormacon Ltd,, a multi-disciplinary management consultancy organisation.He can be contacted at
[email protected]; web www.torconsult.com.
