94
PARTISAN REVIEW
Empire territory are amongst the most devastating I have read), in
another and larger sense the book deals with the inevitable strife between
organized living of any kind and the anarchic enchantment of the sen–
sitive young man who thinks he wants to mind his own business and wishes
other people would do the same. But not only is van Bredepoel not
permitted to remain passive to his existence, not only is he forbidden to
live outside of time in a genteel vacuum, as it were, but he becomes
so
inextricably caught up in the maelstrom of revelations which his sensitive–
ness to life arouses, that in the end, when he cannot reconcile himself to
revolutionary struggle, and substitutes
a
naive, simplistic Christianit)
instead, he dies, a victim to his own caprice.
Mr. Van Der Post has written a dialectical novel in a dual sense. Not
only does he bring into sharp relief the class conflicts between the white
farmers, the small land-owners and the imperialist government, the black
slaves and their prejudice-ridden masters, but in the older Greek sense
of dialectics, which consists of a conversation between two people with
opposing points of view, the personalities of Johan, the pe11ce-loving Christ·
ian, and Burgess, who came from a family of English Socialists among
the
first to accept the doctrine of Marx, become an arena in which a number
of different points of view have battle with each other. The result is
a
kind of ·review lecture on the major ideas for and against revolutionary
activity, granted .existing evils. All of the ideas which pass between van
Bredepoel and Burgess are personified and the actors who personify them
(both Burgess and van Bredepoel are the main actors in the life conflict
of their discussion) engage in dramatic conflict with one another.
The tragedy of Johan is that he dies. Possibly Mrl Van Der
Post
means that Johan, the righteous Christian, like Jesus who placed all
the
responsibility for his riches and their renunciation on the rich man himself,
is destined to die in modern society. Like Hans, the man who questions
society and continues to live while Joachim, the conformist dies in
Till
Magic 11-fountain,
so Burgess, the revol11tionist, the man who organizes
the black slaves to fight against degenerate imperialism, lives at the
close
of
In A Province.
Laurens Van Der Post displays in this first novel a delicate equipoise
between the thinker and the artist, the man of intelligence and the man
of sensibility, which seems to be necessary for all vital men in literature.
His sense of tragedy and over-sympathetic treatment of Johan to the ex·
elusion of many other characters, and his excessive use of understatement
in describing Burgess does not necessarily lead to any corrosive attitude
towards life itself. Despite Johan's confusion and the seeds of terrible
hate which people like Burgess still sow out of their love of the oppressed,
despite his recognition of all that, Mr. Van Der Post illustrates a strong
sympathy and understanding of the forward moving forces of life.
ERrc EsToRrcK
