As she has consistently shown since the emergence of the "New" South Africa, Nadine Gordimer has not relaxed her humourless, formidable gaze on her society. Nor has she ceased observing life around her. In a long career, begun almost half a century ago, she has written many important novels; some with the voice of a campaigner, fewer perhaps with the voice of the natural artist.
The 1991 Nobel Laureate for Literature has never been one of the great literary stylists, as is evident from Burger's Daughter (1979), but she is a storyteller committed to describing how people live amid the ongoing crisis of liberalism in South Africa. Interestingly for such an austere, almost impersonal writer, she has written several novels of unnervingly exact intimacy - such as two of her finest, My Son's Story (1990) and None to Accompany Me (1994).
In The House Gun (1998), she created an astonishing portrait of a white, previously complacent South African couple who, when their son is accused of murder, look towards their black lawyer, an embodiment of the new South Africa, as their saviour. The characters are looked at, examined, assessed with rigour and detached sympathy. It is possible to taste their despair, feel their moments of hope. Gordimer achieves a similar level of perception in the extraordinarily intense study of the relationship at the heart of her powerful, even profound new novel, The Pickup.
One of its many strengths is the fact that Gordimer has placed the couple and their situation not only in the context of present-day South Africa, but in that of a world in which there are no places left to run; a world in which few doors are open to the refugee with nothing to offer except himself. Initially, it seems the action will evolve around the cafΘ existence of young drifters who don't approve of anything, yet do nothing to change it. It seems it may become a book of talk, yet this is precisely what it is not. Gestures and silences dictate the action, and a most unlikely character becomes something of a heroine because Gordimer has drawn all of us into this young woman's agonisingly fraught journey to discovery that proves interestingly devoid of the usual clichΘs.
Gordimer is at her most deliberate throughout. Even the title, with its harsh cynicism, becomes an almost touching refrain. Julie is a young white woman, the privileged daughter of a rich father she dislikes and who is now married to a second, younger wife, and a mother who is off in the US, also remarried to a much younger person. Meanwhile, Julie is being herself; she is working, making a point of driving dodgy old cars and socialising with young people who don't see her as a rich man's child.
All of this information, however, filters through. Gordimer skilfully avoids the obvious in setting up a plot that, initially, appears replete with the obvious. She merely hints at what appears to be Julie's dilemma: she wants to belong somewhere, anywhere. In a dramatic opening sequence, a young woman is in the middle of one of those harmless problems that invariably attract the collective hatred - her car has broken down and she has become the target for all the rage and frustration of those caught in the traffic behind her. "The battery has failed and taxis, cars, minibuses, vans, motorcycles butt and challenge one another, reproach and curse her, a traffic mob mounting its own confusion. Get going. Stupid bloody woman." The injustice of it acquires an element of terror. But the woman, Julie, is saved. Her car is pushed out of the way.
Having met up with her coffee-shop pals, she is directed to a garage. Someone there will fix the car. The young mechanic is an outsider, neither black nor white; he is an Arab. He is the man who will try to fix her car, advise her it's not worth saving. An uneasy rapport is established as Julie is drawn to the young man's silence. It all seems as simple as that. He says his name is Abdu, and speaks to her from the heights of his insecure ego.
Slowly, a relationship is shaped, largely through Julie's persistence. Abdu, who was living in a shed at the garage, moves in with her. At no time does he release his reserve. His awareness of his sexual hold over her is almost as terrifying as her dependence on it quickly becomes. The sexual dynamics is well handled by Gordimer, who relies throughout the book far more on tone and mood than actual description. Julie is never described, but the facts of the world she abandoned are slowly assembled. Much, though not all, of the third person narrative is written in an urgent present tense. Although she does - and even says - relatively little, having become obsessed with Abdu, Julie is extremely sympathetic in her abject love of this man, her pickup.
He, meanwhile, begins to take more notice of Julie, not in the sense of returning her love, but of noting her value. As Abdu's illegal residence comes to an end, he needs a champion. He urges Julie to make use of the father she has nothing to do with, in order to help him. Seldom before in Gordimer's work has the level of psychological scrutiny been as intense as it is throughout this book. Every effort fails. When Julie arrives back with Abdu's airline ticket home to his Arab country, she surprises - and angers - him by bringing two, one for herself. All the while the young woman's desperate hope is balanced against the ruthless use her lover is making of her. They marry.
Once back in his country, the place on earth he hates more than anywhere else, Abdu reassumes his real name, Ibrahim. The various tensions and complications within his own family are well drawn, as is the desert world that fascinates Julie. Although he is a failed immigrant and has been sent back from each of the countries he has tried to enter, Ibrahim is the favoured son. The unspoken depths of the relationship between him and his mother are subtle and complex.
Aware of his power over Julie, to whom all he gives is sex, he puts more pressure on her to use her family to help him. By observing their relationship, its imbalances and ultimate distortion, Gordimer is of course also looking at wider power-shifts. She is particularly convincing on the plight of the illegal immigrant, the resentment and frustrations. Yet this brutal, intense book also possesses moments of vivid domestic life and humanity.
Though dogged and workmanlike, the shrewd, wise Gordimer has often surprised her readers, nowhere more so than here. This characteristically intelligent novel is as gripping as a thriller and as felt as a love song.
Eileen Battersby is the Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
