Recessional

By R.I. Sheppard

A GUEST OF HONOUR by Nadine Gordimer. 504 pages. Viking. $8.95.

The casualty list of world revolution is endlessly varied, and as S. I. Hayakawa said while bullhorning protesters off the San Francisco State campus, "There are no innocent bystanders." That includes such perfect gentlemen as Colonel James Bray, the hero of Nadine Gordimer's fifth novel.

Bray is a 54-year-old former administrator for one of Her Majesty's former African colonies. No Blimp bucking the winds of change, he was cashiered for showing too much sympathy for the local independence movement. After independence, Bray accepts an invitation to return as an educational consultant to Miss Gordimer's nameless, composite, new African nation. His professional commitment to the excruciating process of Third World nation building is complicated because the country's opposing political factions --one moderate, the other revolutionary --are led by two of his former proteges.

While the new elite yammer in plenary session and show off their fountain pens, the new nation's problems veer out of control. There is a rising class of paper shufflers, a groundswell of expectant unemployed, a shortage of skilled labor, a trade union movement that demands more and more at a time when the country needs sacrifices, and roving bands of young thugs and looters. The inevitable result is violence and a wave of bloodshed that finally and fatally engulfs Bray on a lonely up-country road.

Miss Gordimer, a South African noted for skillful short stories and liberal positions, lays out Bray's quiet private life and the dark continent's social issues in more than ample detail. Her principal problem, never really overcome, is how to join a low-key character to high-voltage politics without diminishing interest in either. Bray is too often a laboriously illustrated abstraction of honor and decency whom Miss Gordimer attempts to quicken with some peculiarly imprecise and subjective imagery.

Nevertheless, A Guest of Honour is an unusually honest and serious book. In his own matter-of-fact way, Bray meets the dilemma of whether to be a lip servant or a participant in a manner that does not betray himself or those he cares for. He is an old-fashioned man of private conscience and good will who is doomed in a world of arrogant passions and ruthless compromise. Miss Gordimer sympathetically brackets him between two quotations. The first is from the genteel self-exile Ivan Turgenev: "An honourable man will end by not knowing where to live." The second belongs to the Marxist guerrilla Che Guevara describing himself as an adventurer "who risks his skin to prove his platitudes."

R.I. Sheppard

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