Novel: No Time Like the Present

Overview
No Time Like the Present follows an aging couple, Verna and Stephen, whose lives remain shaped by decades of anti-apartheid activism even as South Africa moves into a democratic but unsettled present. The novel tracks their daily routines and moral conversations in Johannesburg, showing how public history and private intimacy continue to intersect. Rather than telling a high-action story, it unfolds through close observation and reflective scene-setting, allowing social change and its discontents to enter through small domestic moments.
Gordimer stages the narrative around episodes that force the couple to take stock: encounters with crime and insecurity, debates about the legacy of the liberation movement, tensions with younger generations and neighbors, and the slow work of remembering losses and compromises. The arc is less about a single plot twist than about the ethical insistence of people who refuse to retire from social responsibility simply because the system has formally changed.

Main characters
Verna and Stephen are longtime comrades whose commitments have been shaped by decades of struggle. Their bond is political as well as personal: conversations about policy, justice and memory are woven into meals, sex, and the small logistics of shared life. Their son, Fabian, and his choices serve as a point of generational contrast, highlighting how the meanings of activism and safety have shifted since the end of apartheid.
Secondary figures, neighbors, activists, and younger people around them, provide mirrors and counters to the protagonists' steadiness. These relationships illuminate how continuity and change coexist, and how ideals must be rearticulated in the face of new realities such as economic inequality, corruption, and everyday violence.

Themes
Memory and history animate every page. Gordimer examines how people who fought for liberation live with the consequences when liberation does not yield the equality they had imagined. The novel asks what fidelity to political ideals requires when institutions falter and when individual safety and comfort tempt compromise. It probes the duties of conscience in ordinary life: who to help, when to speak out, and how to balance private obligations with public ones.
Race, class and the unfinished project of transformation are central. Gordimer probes the ways privilege persists, how social hierarchies adapt rather than disappear, and how language and narrative shape both accountability and denial. Aging and mortality sharpen ethical reflection, making the characters' decisions feel less hypothetical and more urgent.

Style and tone
Gordimer's prose is calm, precise and deeply reflective, favoring interiority over spectacle. Sentences range from economical to lushly observant, with an undramatic courage that trusts readers to sit with complexity. The narrative voice often leans toward moral scrutiny rather than polemic, producing a steady, contemplative tone that underscores the difficulty of clear answers in turbulent times.
Details of domestic life are rendered with intimacy, which allows political argument to appear as lived practice rather than abstract theory. Dialogues and memories function as moral inquiry, and the pace invites readers to consider the cumulative weight of small choices as much as headline events.

Significance
No Time Like the Present is both a portrait of post-apartheid South Africa and a meditation on what it means to remain committed when the terrain of struggle changes. It refuses easy judgments while insisting that activism is not a youthful chapter to be closed but an ongoing vocation requiring humility, sacrifice and adaptation. The novel resonates beyond its setting as a study of how conscience and companionship sustain political life.
Gordimer's final novels have often returned to questions of responsibility and language; this work continues that concern with greater attention to aging and the domestic. It proves a quietly powerful reminder that political lives extend into the private sphere and that the work of transformation is iterative, unfinished and insistently present.