Nadine Gordimer's method in her last novel, The Conservationist, and in [Burger's Daughter] compares with the naturalist's. She transfixes unlikely and, in this case, suppressed specimens of African life, slices them into sections and subjects them to microscopic scrutiny; it's a method which rejoices in fine detail and is inevitably partial but has the merit of getting in close and conveying with great fidelity the very texture and grain of particular lives and why they may be classified as endangered species. (p. 137)

Nadine Gordimer demonstrates again, as she did so brilliantly in A Guest of Honour, her gift for illuminating great tracts of historical background. The history of the Party in South Africa, suppressed, ignored, reviled and forgotten, is vital to the novel and she records it with great economy and plants among the facts her fictions with consummate skill. If Rosa never emerges very clearly from the...