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rescuer who expected gratitude and sought to impose a new, conformist
self upon her. And the betrayer friend, Carl, turns out to have been no ordi–
nary object of heterosexual jealousy; he was gay and had once been
Duncan's own lover-so the witnessed coupling was double betrayal,
betrayal by both man and woman of the man each had loved and made love
to. Finally, as the defense argues in court, Duncan's temporary loss of con–
scious restraint, his transport of irrational violence, had been provoked
when he had come back to hear Carl tell him, "Oh dear. I'm sorry, Bra,"
using the affectionate black name for "brother" which had been picked up
by white gays. Carl had said that the whole thing had been nothing to get
worked up about, no big deal, after all, a bit of fun among friends, and had
callously babbled on, offering a drink, until Duncan went blank.
Gordimer brings us to this fuller comprehension of the ugly tale with
considerable narrative skill, using the conversations the elder Lindgards
have with Duncan's lawyer during the weeks preceding the trial. Toward
the end, the screw of tension is tightened by the fact that the trial takes
place just as the Constitutional Court is reviewing the constitutionality of
the death penalty, a legacy of the old regime still on the books. Perhaps
Gordimer prolongs the excruciation too far when we are forced to follow
all the sinuosities of the examining magistrate's balancing of evidence for
and against premeditation. But we hold our breath to the last.
Yet this is not all the story, either. The
House Gun
picks up a number
of current topics-capital punishment for one, which has only recently
been eliminated in South Africa, the lack of handgun control, another issue
of the moment, for another. The novel's murder might not have taken
place if the gun kept handy as defense against a violent intruder had not
been in plain view on a table when Duncan confronted Carl the second
time. The larger theme of violence in the new society (the murder rate is
said, today, to be ten times our level in the U.S., violent as we have become)
rumbles behind this lurid tale. This is true even though Duncan is no
child of the streets or of rural poverty and displacement. He is a young
man whose upbringing has been uninvaded by stress, as far as his parents
know. And these parents have been exemplary ethical models-a father
who is eminently respectable as well as successful and religious, a mother
who is a caretaker of others, a medical doctor.
But beyond these topicalities the most fundamental theme in this novel
is one that has always occupied Gordimer-that uneasy relation between
the races which even the end of apartheid has not made into brotherhood.
Claudia, who had so often touched black skin in her practice, had "worked
at clinics to staunch the wounds that racism gashed" and it was not her
kind but "other people [who] tear-gassed and set dogs upon blacks, evict–
ed them from their homes to live in shacks from which old men and
