APARTHEID

...Events are seen from the points of view of the different characters, though most of the story is devoted to Maureen...

...But, she may again be probing that dreamlike plane: For many whites in South Africa today, the looming disaster of a successful black revolt must be a constant concern, the kind of thing that presses on the brain, that one surely dreams about...

...Journalists supposedly are allowed a good deal of freedom, but for a conscientious reporter the country's mine field of press laws can lead to imprisonment and torture...

...Blacks who were not resident could be served liquor only if they were taking or about to take a meal on the premises, or attending a function, such as a conference...

...They battle the forces of the weakening white government in the big cities, while white civilians flee abroad...

...Gordimer's feel for physical detail is poetically exact, especially in chronicling the hard and seamy life of the rural blacks that assaults Maureen's senses...

...It could be comic if it weren't so nightmarish...

...as her husband has to back down and lose face in arguments with local men over the use, and even the ownership, of his car and hunting rifle...

...One of the improprieties was the secret use of government money in an attempt to buy The Washington Star in 1975...

...the strongest exchanges pit her against July...

...But her family's lives now depend utterly on him...

...They could swim if resident at the hotel, and be served liquor at mixed-sex bars if resident or a bona fide guest of a resident...

...Bam Smales and his wife, Maureen, are liberals...

...This is a stunning, powerful novel...

...They escape the tide of battle with their three children in a yellow bakkie, a sports vehicle...

...Pollak, a former literary editor of The Nation, provides a grim account of government censorship under apartheid...

...The apprehension over what will become of Maureen and her family soon gives way to a more compelling suspense: What will come next in her crash-course in self-discovery—she has already figured out that she was not what she thought she was, an understanding liberal—now that survival is at stake...

...Black revolutionaries strike from bases permitted them by the black government in neighboring Mozambique...

...Other blacks could not drink in men's only bars...

...On one hand, Gordimer is creating a situation that is hypothetical and futuristic...

...Much in the book echoes Gordimer's sense of the dreamlike—how apartheid has given South Africa a life that often must not seem real at all...

...Peter LaSalle (Peter LaSalle is the author of a book of short stories, "The Graves of Famous Writers...

...He is an architect and she is a former ballet student, both with records of social concern for blacks and a condescending distaste for many of their racist Afrikaner compatriots...

...She at last realizes that July is somebody with needs and complexities of his own, with as little understanding of her as she has of him...

...Case in point: In an introductory discussion of the general situation in this country where nonwhites outnumber whites by approximately five to one, Pollak quotes from a report on token integration found in the Survey of Race Relations in South Africa, 1978, a yearly compendium of racial developments published in Johannesburg: "Only black visitors using foreign passports could use all hotel facilities...

...Gordimer seemed to be saying that life in contemporary South Africa was often such a lunatic affair—for whites as well as non-whites—that it could take on the texture of a dream...

...July's People, Gordimer's latest novel, is set in a near future, at a time when South Africa has exploded with civil strife...

...In the midst of all this, a white family, the Smales, abandon their once-comfortable home in the Johannesburg suburbs to hide in the village of their longtime black servant, July, far out in the veldt...

...eventually he lets her know it...

...It is not a question of outright totalitarian control...

...it is the trickier situation of the reporter constantly not knowing exactly where he stands vis-a-vis the repressive statute books...

...In 1979 he interviewed African writers in Cameroon, and he currently teaches at the University of Texas...

...The dialog has all the intensity of good stage drama...

...n one of her early novels, The Conservationist, Nadine Gordimer took up the story of a rich South African businessman...

...The book's essentially realistic portrayal often shifted to a surrealistic plane...

...Richard Pollak's Up Against Apartheid is a study of the press in race-mad South Africa...

...Pollak reports in detail on the so-called "Muldergate" scandal (named after a past minister of information, Cornelius P. Mulder), which involved a massive government propaganda effort...

...He also argues well the need for the English-language press in South Africa, claiming that it remains truth's last hope in the country as it is currently governed...

...She waits and watches: as her children learn to eat with their fingers and soon become part of the shabbiness of the village scene...

...From the beginning they are uneasy as July's guests...

...and as the portable radio, their sole contact with the outside world and their former life (repeatedly called "back there"), tells of more rocket attacks and fighting...

...He is a polite and unusually quiet man, who used to be given Wednesdays and alternate Sundays off and who used to return to the village (actually just a rural cluster of ramshackle huts) to visit his own wife and children every two years...