Word: bray
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...picture had hung for years above the fireplace of a cottage in the Thames side village of Bray: a long-nosed, sallow ascetic with a scarred mouth, dressed in fur-trimmed doublet and dark scholar's cloak. A gold halo and inscription announce him to be St. Ivo, "the poor man's lawyer." Behind him, a window discloses silver water, trees, a farm, an arched bridge. The little panel (it measures 181 in. by 141 in.) had disappeared in the Middle Ages and reappeared late in the 19th century in the collection of the first Lord Newlands...
...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...
...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...