Come, rap for the planet

You don’t read Nadine Gordimer without knowing it will be about Africa and its manifold problems of which you will know too little and even if you did know more could do little about. Her new book is no exception, though I think it will trouble our conscience less than usual. Paul Bannerman is a 35-year-old ecologist faced with the probability that a huge dam and a nuclear reactor are going to be built, causing immense damage to the land around them and disruption for those who live there. He and his colleagues are out to stop both ventures. Their activities stall when Paul is operated on for thyroid cancer. Though he is still radioactive and dangerously infectious, his parents, Lyndsay and Adrian, take him into their home to protect his small child and wife, Berenice, who live nearby. Gordimer’s meticulous description of the protective measures, different cutlery, paper plates, monitored sheets and towels, showing how ‘the inconceivable can become routine’, and her description of Paul’s recovery and smile as he reads an e-mail from a sister, ‘D’you mean, you can’t even have a fuck?’, is all very well done. Paul, like all his family, loves sex and his fear that he will never be wakened again by an early-morning erection proves groundless. He recovers and resumes his crusade.

Berenice/Benni, as Gordimer rather irritatingly calls his wife to show she is both sensible and a chick who still likes to be shown a good time, is in advertising and wants to take Paul to recuperate at a client’s resort surrounded by wild life where he will feel at home, but in great luxury where he won’t. Recently he’s told her of fish floating belly up because vital water was diverted to build a huge swimming pool like the one she wants him to swim in.