Books: Double Life in Africa

A WORLD OF STRANGERS (312 pp.)— Nadine Gordimer—Simon & Schuster ($3.95).

Author Nadine Gordimer must be one of the heaviest crosses white South Africans have to bear. She not only tells the truth about her countrymen, but she tells it so well that she has become at once their goad and their best writer. In two books of short stones and a novel, The Lying Days (TIME, Oct. 12, 1953), she had already revealed so much of white hypocrisy and black frustration that her work might have seemed finished. Now, at 34, she proves in an excellent new novel that the faces of evil and arrogance have an endless variety of expressions for one who can bear to look at them.

A World of Strangers is a simple novel that dissolves harrowing complexities. To Johannesburg comes a young Englishman, Tobias Hood, to manage the branch office of his uncle’s publishing business. His only feeling about race problems—and in fact most problems—is that he wants no part of them. Born into a family of compulsive do-gooders (he can still remember his mother reading crusading pamphlets in her bath), he candidly admits that “what I really wanted was to enjoy what was left of the privileged life to which I and my kind have no particular right.”

The trouble with Tobias Hood, though at first he is not aware of it, is that he suffers from simple decency. When he is asked to a mixed party of whites and coloreds, he accepts and makes friends. He is shocked when, after some of these colored friends come to visit him at his office, his white secretary resigns in horror. As the education of Toby’s heart proceeds, he finds himself leading a double life: his white pals and his mistress would drop him like a synthetic diamond if they knew that he was going to slum homes in the colored quarters. Gradually he comes to value his colored friends more than the white—and by that time the last of his complacency is gone.

Author Gordimer, a Johanne burger herself, tours this world of racial strangers with easy accuracy. When she describes a party, white or mixed, a hunting trip, or an illicit visit to a colored shebeen (speakeasy), there is always a byproduct of insights into what is meant by every word or act. When she has finished with Toby Hood, he is a changed man. Any reader who shares Toby’s indifference may feel at least the beginnings of a similar change of heart.