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January 2 - 9, 1998

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The other side of the story

In South Africa, two parents struggle to understand how their son could commit murder

by Donald Paul

THE HOUSE GUN, by Nadine Gordimer. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 294 pages, $24.

Nadine Gordimer -- white South African, political activist, novelist, and Nobel Prize winner -- has always focused on the social issues that force people together, and explored the tensions that twist and buckle their lives. Her last novel, None to Accompany Me (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994), delved into the lives of two couples -- one black, one white -- in a South Africa facing enormous changes. A critic once described it as the essential story of South Africa that had been waiting for an author, and she herself says, "You could call it a novel of the time of transition." The protagonists, two women named Vera Stark and Sibongile Maqoma, play the roles usually assigned to men; they are successful breadwinners, and in their shadows their husbands take shelter.

The House Gun, in a sense, picks up the nation's story some years later; here, Gordimer explores the realm of violence, particularly domestic violence. Harald and Claudia Lindgard have adapted to the transition of a Democratic South Africa by selling the family home and moving to a "townhouse complex with grounds maintained and security-monitored entrance." Their son, Duncan, an architect, has taken the family dog (no pets allowed in the Lingards' townhouse) to live with him in a cottage on the grounds of a large suburban home he shares with a group of young urban professionals, black and white.

Claudia works as a doctor with a private clinic; Harald sits on the board of a large insurance company. Gordimer's use of language, the shifts in who thinks and says what, captures the tight circle of their long-shared life. Into this comes, one Friday evening, a friend of their son with the news that Duncan has shot and killed one of the housemates with -- it turns out -- the house gun, a possession simultaneously outrageous and banal, as common as a house cat. Duncan now waits in jail and does not want his parents to see him until Monday. From here the language changes, and Gordimer begins to provide perspectives gleaned from each parent -- Harald's recollections of school as he enters the prison, Claudia's pragmatic, almost clinical attitude.

Gordimer builds a composite picture of Duncan as seen by his parents, who must rely on memories, shared and personal; on found diaries; on the collage of impressions from his friends; on the testament of his lover, whose infidelity becomes part of the legal defense; and, ultimately, from the sophisticated black lawyer who defends their son, Hamilton Motsamai, "a man who has mastered everything, all contradictions that were imposed upon him by the past." Gordimer's technique layers facts with shreds of truth, and from this Duncan never emerges; he remains an enigma, even after we finally hear his own voice, some two-thirds of the way into the novel.

The Lingards, forced into examining that ill-defined world of adult children and parents, realize not how little they know, but how much they don't. Harald, a man immersed in religion and literature, seems surprised when he comes across Duncan's diary and finds therein a quote from Dostoyevsky. As a doctor, Claudia "stands on the other side of the divide from those who cause [pain]. The divide of the ultimate, between death and life." And now she stands on the other side from her son.

How does a father acknowledge his son's ability to kill, to enter that "labyrinth of violence . . . along with men who robbed and knifed a man"? And how does a mother reconcile the revulsion she feels for a murderer when he is her son and she has become a betrayer of the "covenant [we] made with him"? Gordimer's writing is as hard and relentless as a sheer rock face: traversing this terrain, every word must be grasped, the way a climber on a smooth mountain surface must search for a grip.

The author once said that details are what convey truth and connect narrative. By this she meant that the reader comes to understand her characters and their thoughts through a process of accretion, through the gathering of nuances. The House Gun remains true to this vision. But the accretion seems meager, the sense of ambivalence overwhelming, the factual conclusion too inevitable and, more chilling, too nihilistic: that violence, or the option of violence, comes readily and unthinkingly in a society equipped to defend itself.

Donald Paul is a freelance editor and writer in Cape Town, South Africa.

From The House Gun

The gun is in court. It has become Exhibit 1. A draught of curiosity bends the companions in the public forward to try and catch a glimpse of it.

It's nothing but a piece of fashioned metal; Harald and Claudia don't need to see it. The fingerprints of the accused's left hand, the Prosecutor says, were discovered upon it by forensic tests, his fingerprints unique to him in all humanity, as he is unique to them as their only son.
--You know this handgun?--
--Yes.--
--Do you own it?--
--No.--
--Who does?--
--I don't know in whose name it was licensed. It was the gun kept in the house so that if someone was attacked, intruders broke in, whoever it was could defend himself. Everyone.--
--Did you know where it was kept?--
--Yes. Usually in a drawer in the room David and Carl shared.--
--You lived in the cottage, not the house; how did you know this?--
--We all knew. We live -- lived -- in the same grounds together. If the others were out, and I heard something suspicious, I'd be the one who would need it.--


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