First published 1974
Mehring owns a farm outside Johannesburg, but the land feels more like a burden than a blessing. He drives out from the city on weekends, surveying his property with the eye of someone who possesses but doesn't truly belong. The discovery of a dead body on his land unsettles him, forcing him to confront the workers he employs but barely knows and the country that surrounds but excludes him. As political tensions simmer in apartheid South Africa, Mehring finds himself caught between worlds he cannot bridge. His relationships with his son, his mistress, and the people who work his land reveal the impossibility of his position. The conservationist of the title preserves nothing but his own precarious existence in a society fracturing around him. Gordimer captures a man whose attempts at control reveal only his powerlessness in a landscape that refuses his claim to ownership.
Genres: fiction, 20th-century, african-literature, contemporary
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, man-vs-society
Setting: Johannesburg, South Africa
Period: 20th-century
252 pages · Hardcover · London: Jonathan Cape, 1974