Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter is a remarkable book at the same time that it is difficult, repetitious, dense, and occasionally overwritten. It is remarkable in that it explores the political truths of 20th-century apartheid using the Afrikaner Burger family; their friends, black and white; their relatives; their Communist party allies and enemies; and most particularly their daughter Rosa….

The novel's time-span is great enough for us to observe the ideological changes among blacks, from their early alliance with whites in support of their freedom to their present political stance in which no whites of whatever liberal views are acceptable. A strength of the book is that, in the workings-out of Lionel Burger's career, and his daughter's, we begin to understand exactly what life for the politically involved white is like in South Africa….

[There] is a difficulty inherent in using so heavy a layer of ideology in a...