No Time Like the Present by Nadine Gordimer; Absolution by Patrick Flanery - review by Lyndall Gordon

Lyndall Gordon

Unweaving the Rainbow Nation

No Time Like the Present

By

Bloomsbury 432pp £18.99

Absolution

By

Atlantic Books 389pp £12.99
 

Nadine Gordimer’s great oeuvre of stories and novels has been suffused with the issue of racial injustice. Her Nobel prize was awarded in 1991, the year after Nelson Mandela was released from prison. The ‘rainbow nation’ was born when Mandela’s high-minded ANC party took office in 1994. 

Eighteen years into the new South Africa, Gordimer puts her long support to the test. No Time Like the Present follows the rainbow lives of a group of one-time freedom fighters for whom moral choices were once simple. Their voices in the present draw us into moral disturbance: the bribes

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