SOURCE: "In a Far-off Country," in Times Literary Supplement, September 9, 1994, p. 20.

In the following review, Dinnage outlines the narrative of None to Accompany Me.

For forty years Nadine Gordimer has been revealing to us the splendours and miseries of life in her extraordinary country; now in this latest novel [None to Accompany Me] she takes us through the dramatic and confused transitional period just before the establishment of South African majority rule.

The narrative (there is no "story" in the usual sense) centres on two couples, one white and one black, and parallel with the political events that carry them along, is an account of the vicissitudes of long marriages. Vera Stark (the name must indicate special endorsement for the character) has been married since the 1940s to Bennet. She has two secrets: their elder son may actually have been fathered by the husband she had lived with...