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 Nadine Gordimer here pays tribute.

Nadine Gordimer writes ...

We speak of a 'body' of writing when an author has produced a number of works that make up, in the span of his or her life so far, an intent, a discovery of the meanings of life experiences that illuminate what and who we are. An identity formed by our historical past, its ethos and ideas, our adoption or rejection of these in our present, and crucially above all the attempt at resolution between socio-political pressure and personal, private emotional drives.

The 'body' of C. J. Driver's extraordinary work is the warring convictions, the questioning resolutions, the frustrations and fulfilments, body-soul-spirit of human life in the different forms these take in different places and circumstances.

From the tensions between young revolutionaries in war against apartheid, told from the fundament of placing the Struggle before self, even before survival - Elegy for a Revolutionary; to the 'accommodations' of a white woman with her own liberal standards of peaceful means towards justice in a time and place when, emerging out of herself, she finds the need to risk becoming an accessory to the struggle - Send War in Our Time, O Lord; to the boldly original tackling of the nature of authority as danger inherent in progeniture, that of father-son and father-figure schoolmaster to pupil - Death of Fathers, with its strong reflection, known at once in the context of reading Driver's 'body' of work, bringing the reader to the origin of domination by police and military authority.

A Messiah of the Last Days is, I believe, something no other South African writer who has had personal 'bodily' experience of such authority - Driver spent ninety days in solitary confinement as a young anti-apartheid activist - has also had the broadness of compass to explore in world vision.

In this novel a lawyer, not an anti-apartheid activist and not within the limit of the South African conflict, is telling a story of class, not race conflict: in England. A democracy, a free country with class conflict openly evident in parliamentary debate, Labour, Liberal, Conservative. There has arisen a revolutionary extremist group who call themselves the Free People. Could be the name of a necessary world phenomenon? Many eras, many parts of the planet.

This particular avatar of aspiration to create full humanity is engaged by its lawyer-narrator between the injustice of inequality in a country which is supposed to be that of a united people, and the contradictions within the extremist radicals themselves in action against the injustice.

'These young claimed to be political but regarded political organization as a waste of time ... They claimed God was dead but spoke the language of religious mania. They claimed to speak for the workers but despised the workers for their concern with money ... they claimed to be open to all but regarded people over thirty almost subhuman in their progress to death.'

C. J. Driver's exceptional alertness to our times is matched by the power and zest of his evocative writing, lit up by wry wit. Faber Finds brings us enlivening insights with its find of these four important books for republication. Our era is right and relevant for them to reach a new public.

-- Read also: J. M. Coetzee on C. J. Driver