Faber & Faber

Reissued in Faber Finds in 2010 are four novels by C. J. 'Jonty' Driver - Elegy for a Revolutionary, Send War in Our Time, O Lord, Death of Fathers and A Messiah of the Last Days, a body of work which, whilst not exclusively about South Africa, says much about the political and social situation in the country of Driver's birth in the years of apartheid. Fellow South African author J. M. Coetzee shows his appreciation of his fellow countryman's fiction.

J. M. Coetzee writes ...

In the late 1960s and early 1970s the South African-born writer C. J. Driver published, in short order, four novels. Thereafter he published no fiction, though he continued to write poetry.

Elegy for a Revolutionary (1969), based on a notorious case in which a group of young white South Africans, despairing of peaceful opposition to a government prepared to use all means, fair and foul, to retain its grip on power, embarked on a programme of sabotage, choosing targets (the rail system, the electrical grid) that would not entail the loss of human life. Amateurish in their organization, they were soon tracked down by the police and put on trial for acts of terrorism.

At the core of Driver’s account of the rise and fall of this resistance cell is the question of whether violence can be justified as a way of opposing tyranny; but at a more concrete level the novel is about the all-too-human weaknesses that save decent, idealistic young people from turning themselves into machines of destruction and death.

Send War in Our Time, O Lord (1970) is a second and more despairing examination of South Africa under apartheid. It imagines the moment in history when the national mood of 'patient waiting, sullen waiting' turns into armed resistance, as a prelude, perhaps, to a full-blown war of liberation on South African soil.

As a novelist, Driver struggles here to locate a moral position that repudiates the inhuman methods of both the authorities and the insurrectionists, yet does not retreat  into simply pronouncing a plague on both their houses - a struggle manifested in the novel by the descent into madness of its most sympathetic character, an ageing white woman.

With Death of Fathers (1972) and A Messiah of the Last Days (1974) Driver turns from the matter of South Africa to questions of the day in the United Kingdom to which he had moved. At their most fundamental level these two novels confront the question of what basis - moral, political, and perhaps even religious - authority can claim in a Europe which has been party to the atrocities of World War II. This question is posed most directly and pointedly by the young revolutionaries of the 1960s, impatient with the timid conformity of their parents and grandparents, dreaming of new forms of social and erotic communitarianism.

As in the South African novels, Driver dramatizes the anguish of his narrators (his narrative authorities), torn between, on the one hand, sympathy and even admiration for the idealism of the new generation, and, on the other, dismay at the hubris or the plain intellectual slovenliness that leads them to repeat the catastrophic errors of generation after generation of utopians before them.

These early novels by C. J. Driver exhibit a poised control of narrative method, to which a close study of such predecessors as Ford Madox Ford and Graham Greene has probably contributed (Send War in Our Time is the weakest of the four in this respect). Looking back we can see them as the work of a highly gifted young writer exploring two of the most troubling moral and political concerns of his day: the future of Europe’s ex-colonies in Africa; and the West’s chaotic cultural revolution of the 1960s, against which the forces of reaction were already beginning to gather.

-- Read also: Nadine Gordimer on C. J. Driver