The Conservationist

Mehring, a wealthy white industrialist, buys a farm outside Johannesburg as a weekend retreat and a tax shelter, and clings to his ownership of the land even as an unclaimed Black corpse, found and carelessly buried in his veld, quietly asserts a deeper and older claim. Gordimer's Booker-winning novel is set on the real Highveld of the Transvaal: the farm and its river and reeds, the African workers' compound, and the encroaching city and location that press on Mehring's fragile idyll.

Mehring

The farm

The owner

Mehring, a rich white industrialist, buys a farm beyond the city as a retreat, a tax dodge and a pastoral fantasy of himself as a man of the land. Gordimer opens in his proprietary contentment, the master surveying his acres, a complacency the whole novel will slowly and pitilessly undermine.

The opening chapters

inspired by Mehring's weekend farm is set on the Highveld outside Johannesburg; drawn from the real Transvaal farmland and sited there.

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