Journey to a Cape Town Dais

...Her father remarries and relinquishes the responsibility for her upbringing to his first wife's sisters, Olga and Pauline, who adopt Hillela in turn...

...She is attracted by the man's reserves of magnetic power...

...Her vagrant phase comes to an end and a new one begins when she falls in love with and marries Whaila Kgomani, a "black revolutionary envoy" from South Africa, an intimate of Kwame Nkrumah and Oliver Tambo...

...The country's first black leaders are on the dais, flanked by "white churchmen and individuals or representatives of organizations who actively supported the liberation struggle...

...This is the man Hillela stands beside on the dais...

...Sasha's long final letter to her, written in solitary confinement, is toughminded, but tender, funny, realistic, and lucid—one could not imagine Hillela writing anything remotely as good...

...she believes in no truths save those granted by the body...

...The progress of Sasha, as conveyed in a series of letters he writes to Hillela, is more real, or at least more moving...

...18.95 Reviewed by Oliver Conant Contributor, "Dissent, " New York "Times Book Review" Nadine Gordimer commands respect both as a writer of fiction and as a moral witness...

...Her evocation of the community of exiled South Africans—"that noncriminal caste of people from all classes and of all colors strangely forced to the subterfuge of real criminals evading justice"—is similarly impressive...

...Because of its authorship, one expects it to be told with finely shaded irony and an intelligence at once worldly, restless and passionate—and it is...

...For long stretches she ceases to be a fully imagined character and instead functions as a vehicle for Gordimer's commentary on people, events and South African political history generally...

...Hillela herself is to all appearances devoid of political ideals...

...And in what sense is she a "sport of nature" (if indeed the title, a naturalist's term, is meant to apply to her...

...Over and over Hillela's chameleonlike nature is stressed, particularly her way of adapting to the man she is with...

...At other times Gordimer seems thoroughly beguiled by her creation and employs the inquisitive, gossipy tone of biographer charting the unglamorous beginnings of a glamorous public figure...

...As Hillela later puts it, "nothing was said in that bed, not about love of fellow man, not about family love, not about sisterly, brotherly love, but it was done...

...Hillela's willingness to accommodate herself to each of her lovers is, alas, all too normal...

...Still, some of Gordimer's characteristic strengths as a novelist—her toughness and grace, her staggering capacity to sympathetically imagine deeply unsympathetic people—are hardly detectable in A Sport of Nature...

...Then suddenly the author exudes pious admiration for her immersion in the busy life of political activism, of committee work and fund-raising...

...What Gordimer has given us in A Sport of Nature is something resembling a revolutionary potboiler—oxymoronic though that may sound...

...Beside him is his wife, a diminutive white woman with striking eyes, wearing traditional African dress...

...The birth of the new black republic is declared by the Chairman of the Organization of African Unity...

...Before Whaila's death, Hillela bears him a daughter, to whom she gives Winnie Mandela's African name, "Nomzamo...

...Although their quasi-incestuous relations are, of course, prompted by awakening sexual desires, the adolescents see themselves as making a sort of protest against Pauline's abstract moralizing...

...Nevertheless, A Sport of Nature does not rank with Gordimer's most accomplished works, The Conservationist or Burger's Daughter...

...Not only is he powerful, but he actually seizes power in his (unnamed) country, and holds it...

...The white woman destined to end up on the dais is born Hillela Capran, of a South African Jewish family...

...A Sport of Nature is written from the perspective of the future, just after a great ceremony (described in the final pages) marking the end of white rule in South Africa...

...Hillela briefly considers marrying the American, then breaks off the engagement when she meets, on one of her trips back to Africa, amanshe finds as irresistible as Whaila was.Heisareal general this time, middle-aged and enormously vigorous, with the kind of stern heroic face that seems designed "for a postage stamp...

...When she is only an infant, her lusty and impulsive mother is lured away by the charms of Latin men and the night life of Mozambique (in some respects prefiguring Hillela's later flight...

...There are moments when Gordimer comes perilously close to affirming what was once a sturdy article of faith for the progressive novelist, the idea that selfdiscovery can be achieved by losing one's self in the struggle against oppression...

...But Whaila's offensive is over before it can really begin: While planning raids across the border he is killed by agents of Pretoria...

...Hillela gains new admirers—in Eastern Europe, an elderly dissident Communist, a contemporary of Gyorgy Lukacs...

...Above the throngs sway placards bearing the "enormous faces of those who have not lived to see this day," the martyrs of the long fight...

...there is too much continent-hopping and taking the reader "behind the scenes...

...In the course of a lengthy career that has so far yielded nine novels (counting the present one), she has made herself the conscience of a conscienceless regime...

...they induce in her a concentration "like that a woman must feel when a General comes to her on the night before a great offensive begins...

...A sport of nature is a freak, a new variety, a departure from the norm...

...The widow of the slain freedom fighter and her dark offspring (who later becomes a highly paid fashion model) make a striking impression abroad...

...If it is far from clear how Sasha's "unbeatable purpose" will result in the triumphant ceremony, the glad day of Gordimer's final pages, reading this novel leaves one in no doubt as to the urgency of her hopes for the future...

...Referring to his comrades in the struggle, he speaks confidently of "the unbeatable purpose expressed in the horrible mishmash of Marxism, Castroism, Gandhism, Fanonism, Hyde Park tub-thumping (colonial heritage), Gawdon-our-sideism (missionary tieritage), Black Consciousness jargon, Sandinistism, Christian liberation theology with which we formulate...

...Hillela throws herself into her husband's cause and becomes an emissary for the ANC...

...But like far better works from the same hand, the work proceeds from an active imagination of political possibility, a faculty rarely encountered in the general run of contemporary fiction writers...

...True, she does things here that would be taken as evidence of a major gift in a writer of lesser stature...

...Also remarkable is Gordimer's deft handling of the love that develops between Hillela and Pauline's teenage son, Sasha...

...Nor does the whole book really hang together well: The heroine's journey has too many turns...

...Attractive equally to men with ideals and those without, she has affairs with a white African National Congress (ANC) sympathizer and an oily French ambassador...

...Born a white South African, she grew up loving the land, knowing its torment, and hating its system of apartheid...

...I find it hard to know what the author means us to think about the heroine of A Sport of Nature...

...Unwilling to remain a "surrogate daughter" for long, Hillela at 17 begins an independent existence, leaving South Africa with a radical journalist of dubious political reliability...

...It is not so much Sasha's decision to become an organizer of black South African workers that makes us care about him, nor is it the long imprisonment we know will be his lot...

...Chanting and singing, massive crowds—including thousands of whites wearing T-shirts bearing the face of the once banned figure who is now the President—fill a Cape Town stadium specially built for the occasion...

...The author's true feelings remain as mysterious as the "dark opacity" of Hillela's eyes...

...Rather, it is the fact that he faces and tries to resolve his own country's contradictions, a choice Hillela never makes...

...The story recounts how she ended up at the focal point of this momentous scene...

...She can summon a whole way of life in a phrase or two, as when she describes "the shabbyaffluent liberal living room, filled with books and generous with wine and food...

...He abandons her as soon as they are out of the country, whereupon she simply drifts, a lovely bit of flotsam cast up among the exiles and political hangers-on who line the beaches along the Indian Ocean...

...Yet the ironic picture of Hillela installed with her general in the pomp and luxury of his small country's State House works against a sentimental view of her and recalls the materialistic life of her aunt Olga...

...And she has something of Conrad or Dostoyevsky's interest in the psychology of the subterranean life led by sectarians and revolutionaries...

...The contrast drawn between Olga's life of unexamined comfort and Pauline's indomitable liberalism—which is both criticized for its patronizing of blacks and cherished for its ardor—is one of the best aspects of the novel...

...in America, an affluent young liberal economist who offers her his hand in marriage and his New York brownstone (Gordimer's observations of American life are sharp, yet in the present climate this character seems most unlikely...

...Are we finally to think of Hillela as a pleasure-seeking opportunist...