Book Review: In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut

Read: October 2010

Reviewed for Borewrimo, a month in which I aim to experiment with the form and purpose of book reviewing by writing 50,000 words of book reviews as short stories.

“The world you’re moving through flows into another one inside, nothing stays divided any more, this stands for that, weather for mood, landscape for feeling, every object is a corresponding inner gesture.”

She cannot now remember which came first: that churning unease in the pit of her stomach, or reading that book. Perhaps she had been feeling that way for a while; perhaps she only became aware of it when that unacknowledged sensation was represented back to her in words; perhaps…

She is not sure.

A classic case of cause and effect, one could say, though she doubts it is quite that simple.
From this vantage, months later, she has traced the feeling back to within a few days of starting the book. But when she tries to focus in further it distorts and she loses perspective.

So she doesn’t try

Except that she does. Here, now, writing this. What else is it if not an effort to understand? In writing she seeks to solidify what she has learned about herself in reading. In writing she tries to replicate the intensity she has felt while reading. She quotes liberally to breathe life into a person she briefly was, but that has now been and gone.

She suspects that In a Strange Room comes from a similar compulsion; that Galgut felt compelled to replicate what he has felt during long, meandering journeys. There are three of them here, to Swaziland, through southern Africa, and around India. They are linked, she feels, not by characters or plot but by a shared atmosphere, a shared narrator, a shared individual trapped inside himself.

“In this state travel isn’t celebration but a kind of mourning, a way of dissipating yourself. He moves around from one place to another, not driven by curiosity but by the bored anguish of staying still.”

Though he finds companions on each of these journeys, they are characterised by an introverted, self-reflective, lonely quality which infuses every letter of every word. With those he travels he plays a different role, yet remains indelibly himself. The first journey, ‘The Follower’ takes place in a vast empty landscape populated only by the wandering travellers and occasional tribes. She feels agoraphobic, exposed. Uprooted and disconcerted in a way that she cannot put her finger on. This atmosphere is maintained in the second and third journeys where empty landscapes are gradually replaced by bustling trains and cities, hospitals and hotels. The world he travels grows full of people yet he remains alone in their midst. The strange room of the title is himself. It is the incongruity of a rootlessness that drives one on to wake up in a familiarly strange room every morning. At one point he mentally addresses a friend who, for a short time, offered the possibility of something else.

“Jerome, if I can’t make you live in words, if you are only the dim evocation of a face under a fringe of hair, and the others too, Alice and Christian and Roderigo, if you are names without a nature, it’s not because I don’t remember, no, the opposite is true, you are remembered in me as an endless stirring and turning. But it’s for this precisely that you must forgive me, because in every story of obsession there is only one character, only one plot. I am writing about myself alone, it’s all I know, and for this reason I have always failed in every love, which is to say at the very heart of my life.”

My life. Galgut writes of his narrator Damon as though of himself. The narrative flits between first and third person, often passing back and forth within a single sentence. Somehow Galgut pulls this off, further alienating both narrator and reader from the landscapes through which they travel, the selves they have become. Like JM Coetzee’s Summertime, In a Strange Room appears to be first and foremost a game of hide and seek, or perhaps a long string – laid discarded for too long – whose ends are pulled hard so that it twists into a knot the reader cannot ever hope to untangle. Whether it is biography or not is for literary critics to argue over. She does not think it matters.

She loved this book viscerally rather than mentally, not because of its ideas or storyline but for the way it made her feel. It affected her more than any book she has read in a long time. It shook her to her core and she is still trembling.

She is reminded of the French writer Marcel Aymé whose best-known story Le Passe-Muraille (The Walker Through Walls) tells the tale of a man who finds he is able to walk through walls. She feels that she has somehow slipped through a semi-permeable membrane into another persons head, but that when she tried to leave found herself stuck, half inside and half out.

She is not sure where to go from here. This book was a journey from which she may not be able to return.

“A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it’s made. You go from one place to another place, and onto somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there. Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return.”

In the end she comes to a conclusion that is not really a conclusion at all. They happen together, her life and the book. It doesn’t matter which came first because neither could have been as they have without the other. Well, the book could have been. But not for her. And what, I ask, is a book without a reader?

In a Strange Room is published by Atlantic Books. (180pp, ISBN: 9781848873223, £15.99)

Book Review: Waiting for the Barbarians - J.M. Coetzee

To celebrate the 200^th review on Books, Time, and Silence, I will be re-posting 10 of my favourite reviews. 

On day four I revisit J.M. Coetzee's masterpiece, Waiting for the Barbarians.

Read: April 2008
Waiting for the Barbarians in one tweet-sized chunk:
Waiting for the Barbarians is the clearest enunciation of Coetzee's primary concern: individual shame for collective crimes.
 

“‘When some men suffer unjustly...it is the fate of those who witness their suffering to suffer the shame of it.”

Set in the harsh, desolate frontier lands of a nameless Empire in a timeless age, Waiting for the Barbarians is a sparse, allegorical novel, devastatingly powerful in its depiction of one mans complicity in barbaric acts of so called ‘civilisation’. It is the clearest enunciation of the concerns which run through much of Coetzee's fiction: independent thought in the face of a single public conscience, the surprising involvement of the outsider,  moral conviction, peace. It is a beautiful and powerful book; probably my favourite of all his works.

For years the Magistrate has presided over the affairs of a small, peaceful frontier fort, collecting rents, settling petty disputes, and excavating the ruins of fallen towns, unconcerned about rumours of an impending war with the Barbarians. But when interrogators from the shadowy Third Bureau arrive it seems they are intent on turning his peaceful harmony into a raging battlefield. And following a case of barbaric torture, the Magistrate is jolted from his comfortable complicity into an act of quixotic rebellion and he begins to learn just how lonely martyrdom can be.

Waiting for the Barbarians sees Coetzee tackling big issues: complacency and complicity in the face of barbarism, the boundary between freedom and incarceration, and the devastation war inflicts on both our psyches and ways of life. It is too easy to say it is an allegory for apartheid in South Africa - though undoubtedly it is – for Coetzee’s real success is in expanding theses small particulars, to a general treatise on human nature and the social systems we build to, supposedly, protect ourselves from the barbarian outsiders.

Many writers have meditated on the collision between conscientious individuals and harsh, repressive regimes. Kafka did it in The Trial, Camus in The Outsider, Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley in Brave New World, and the list goes on and on. If there is a twentieth century literary concern this is probably it. But Coetzee takes it that stage further than others, to analyse the complicity of the Magistrate himself, to question the arrogance of one man standing righteous against the tide of popular opinion, the pointlessness of it all. Coetzee doesn’t merely make his Magistrate a victim of the bureaucracy, but he is complicit within it, and knows even as he fights back that he is just doing so to cleanse his own narcissistic guilt. He is by no means a shining white night of freedom but a flawed person just trying to live his life in his own way.

Furthermore, the sense of place Coetzee creates is exquisite: the vast, empty wilderness a bleak uncompromising landscape looming ominously over the entire novel. The nomadic austerity of life in that wasteland strikes a chord with the barren emotional prospects of its central character. It is evocative of Doris Lessing’s Mara and Dan, an untamed world, shorn of romantic connotations, a greater threat to the lives of man than ever the Barbarians could be.

You don’t read Coetzee to enjoy a stroll through the park, you read Coetzee because, perhaps more than any other modern novelist, he knows what it is to be human, and he is able to convey it all so simply, in so few words that it leaves you stumped. You shake your head regularly, unsure whether you love or hate the characters, uncertain how such stripped down life can be portrayed so beautifully. Because above all else, Coetzee is a beautiful writer, his prose flows from pen to paper to reader invisibly, reads so smoothly you barely realise what an accomplishment it is. And he presents his situations starkly, vividly, but with an equanimity and reluctance that leaves you devastated. The scarcity of the prose, the barren landscape of possibility, the simple power of his storytelling, each of these is exquisite.

This is a very, very great novel. And despite everything it carries no message, save perhaps a call for recalcitrance in the face of force. As the Magistrate says: 

“I believe in peace, perhaps even peace at any price.”

You know what? I think I agree with him.

9 out of 10

Boyhood - J.M. Coetzee

Day 9 of the Books, Time, and Silence 10 Days of Christmas

Read: August 2009

Boyhood in one Tweet-sized chunk:
One of the richest and most rewarding insights into the experience of childhood you will ever read.

Boyhood is the first of John Coetzee's fictionalised biographies, telling the story of his childhood, from birth through to adolescence. Told with the redolent economic prose and exact lyricism that won him the Nobel Prize, it is a searingly self aware, 'warts and all' view of childhood in 1940s and 50s South Africa and an insight into the mentality of the man Coetzee feels himself to be.

We meet John aged eight or nine, a precocious child with an appetite for learning but few social skills. Outside the homestead he is a shy, retiring type, but at home he becomes something of a tyrant, a demanding and difficult child who craves and disdains love in equal measure.

The Coetzee's live in Worcester, a small city 90 miles from Cape Town in the Afrikaner heartlands of the Karoo. They are middle class Africaner, who by virtue of education “prefer to be English”. His father, a government official/lawyer, has a tendency toward alcohol, and his mother believes that “studying is just nonsense”. Although he has a brother who barely appears, John is a solitary child, a sickly and bookish boy with an active imagination. When choosing sides in the Cold War he picks the Russians because the capital R is “the strongest of all the letters.” He spins glorious fantasies of Troy and of British valour at Dunkirk and devises an automated bowling machine so he can play cricket alone in the garden. He is happiest when he is playing by himself.

Yet for all his precocity, John is distinctly unimpressed with the sort of person he is. Boyhood chronicles not only the promise that literature provides him for escape from provincial tedium, but the weakness and vulnerability of childhood too. He is only too aware of his social shortcomings, and lives a life of doubt, anxiety and self-derision. He is haunted by what seem to be routine and harmless events: getting his hair cut is a “remorseless” experience that leaves him “squirming with shame”, while the very idea of being late for school precipitates nightmares in which “he weeps in helpless despair”.

At school he is an outsider whatever he does. Unlike the other kids he has never been caned, and lives in perpetual fear of it happening. He would like to be beaten, if only once, in order to fit in. It becomes a right of passage to him, but one he cannot bring himself to effect. He tries to go bare foot like the Afrikaans boys, but when his feet hurt instead of sympathy is met by derision from the other boys. When forced to specify his religion at school he makes a spur of the moment decision to identify as Catholic and finds himself ostracised, not only from the protestant and Anglican majority, but the other Catholics who mistrust him and suspect he has lied.

Behind all of this lies apartheid: silent and insidious and vile. If his mother calls to a black man in the street they must come and do her bidding. There are no black children at the school. Yet the apartheid isn't the only social tension, the Afrikaners are ostracised too, their language, poverty and rural ways making them almost as maligned. It is a world the young John feels horribly uncomfortable in, but he is too young to understand quite why. He wants to write, and if he did he would write about “something dark,” something that reflects the world he lives in.

What he does understand is the dynamics of his family. He spends much of his time dissecting and evaluating them, establishing his role within the family and the effect they have on him. He sees himself in his father and for that reason cannot stand to be around him. Of his mother he is more conflicted: torn somewhere between cloying obsession and raging against the claustrophobia of her love. He is made weak by this love which he craves and goes great lengths to inspire, yet lives in fear that his ''ugly, black, crying, babyish core” will be revealed. She has turned him into “something unnatural, something that needs to be protected if it is to continue to live.”

He loves and hates his mother as Coetzee the writer loves and hates many of his female characters. He describes himself as twice-born: once from woman and once from the family farm in Voelfontein. And it is here, where they visit once a year, the young John feels most at home. He “loves every stone of it, every bush, every blade of grass, loves the birds that give it its name, birds that as dusk falls gather in their thousands in the trees around the fountain, calling to each other, murmuring, ruffling their feathers, settling in for the night.” It is is a place he feels free, and a place he returns to in Summertime. “The farm is his secret fate.”

The landscapes of his fiction are scattered throughout, most notably in the relationship he feels for Voelfontein which mirrors that of the farm in Life and Times of Michael K. Yet what is perhaps most skilled in Boyhood is that it does not read as a work of revisionist history, demonstrating that the young Coetzee was always destined to be a writer. As in Youth it rarely evident that he is to become one of the leading novelists of his generation. At the end, however, there is a tantalising clue. Boyhood ends, as many do, with the death of a relative and John wondering what will happen to her stockpile of stories. Who will remember them now that she is gone?

Boyhood is a very real, very honest account of childhood, with its joys – cycling around the neighbourhood and going to the cinema – as well as its struggles. As a work of autobiography it is a warm and funny, yet run through with deep discomfort. As with all biographies, it says as much about the person writing it as it does its subject but what resounds throughout is a sense of childhood, a sense that even if it is partly Coetzee projecting his adult self onto the person he was, he is aware enough, and skilled enough as a storyteller, to inhabit his character. The result is one of the richest and most rewarding insights into the experience of childhood you will ever read.


7 out of 10

Summertime - J.M. Coetzee

Read: August 2009

Summertime in one tweet-sized chunk:

Coetzee at his most human. Passionate, illuminating and razor-sharp, it’s a stunning work of semi-biographical fiction.

31 May 1975
South Africa is not formally in a state of war, but it might as well be. As resistance has grown, the rule of law has step by step been suspended. The police and the people who run the police (as hunters run packs of dogs) are by now more or less unconstrained. In the guise of news, radio and television relay the official lies. Yet over the whole sorry, murderous show there hangs an air of staleness. The old rallying cries – Uphold white Christian civilization! Honour the sacrifices of the forefathers! – lack all force. We, or they, or we and they both, have moved into the endgame, and everyone knows it.

Summertime is the third of John Coetzee's fictionalised autobiographies, taking up its story ten years after Youth. Following the premature end to his six years in America, John has returned to South Africa to live in a dilapidated shack on the outskirts of Cape Town with his father. He is chastened by his experiences abroad, embarrassed by the country he has had to return to. It may be titled Summertime, but this is no tale of a man in the prime of his life. The Coetzee we meet here is lonely and frustrated, uncomfortable with almost everything about who he is and where he lives. The decade since Youth seems not to have changed him much, save that perhaps the hint of optimism which illuminated the ending of that work seems now to be thoroughly extinguished.

The biggest change from Boyhood and Youth, is in the structure of this work. Whereas they followed a straight forward linear narrative told through an incisive third person singular voice, Summertime sees a more stylistically adventurous approach. It is narrated by a young biographer who is writing a biography of the late John Coetzee. He decides to focus on the period between 1972 and 1977 when, he suspects, Coetzee was finding himself as a writer. In order to get an idea of the man he was, the biographer embarks upon a series of interviews with people who were significant to him at this time, whether they knew themselves to be or not. Through their stories emerges an impression of a less than ordinary man, an eternal outsider: shy, recalcitrant, uncomfortable in his own skin, his family, and his country. He takes up dancing to try to woo a women only to make a fool of himself; he is regarded with mistrust by his family; he struggles valiantly (though ineffectively) to assuage the guilt he feels about the society around him. We see him engaging in manual labour as penitence for his countries long history of “making other people do our work for us while we sit in the shade and watch.” He mends his own car, badly, leading to an awkward and cold night alone in the middle of nowhere with his cousin Margot. He takes up brickwork to protect the house from rainwater. His love of Voelfontein, the Coetzee family estate in the Karoo, remains as passionate as ever it was in Boyhood but everywhere else he is lost. South Africa has become a “loud angry place.”

Yet the problem is he does not belong anywhere. He has tried England and struggled, been rejected citizenship in the United States. For better or worse South Africa seems to be the only place that will have him. So he channels his frustrations, fears, and tentative hopes into his writing. While we do not get much of a view of Coetzee the writer, his passion occasionally pokes its way through his flaccid persona. At one point he tells a women with whom he is having a passionless affair: “There is always something or other I am working on...If I yielded to the seduction of not working what would I do with myself? What would there be to live for? I would have to shoot myself.” At another he describes books as a “gesture of refusal in the face of time. A bid for immortality.” Yet despite this there seems little evidence of the writer he will become. As one of the women states: “How can you be a great writer if you are just an ordinary little man?”

Summertime is a fascinating portrait of life, and like most lives it is full of contradiction and dichotomy. It is biographical in most of its content yet largely fictional in the manner of its telling. It is meant to be about one man, but spends more time being about other people. The story is largely told by women who he felt were significant in his life, yet there is no passion there whatsoever. Then there is the contradictory title itself. But far from spoiling the portrait, the result of all this dichotomy is a stunning character study which manages to present a compelling and vivid account of a man stuck in a rut, struggling to find his place in a society in which he doesn't want to fit in. Through the eyes of the other characters we get fascinating little insights into his character. One of the most enthralling pieces comes from a former colleague at the University of Cape Town who reflects upon his political standpoint, shedding light on the always present basis of his fiction.

'He thought that politics bought out the worst in people. It brought out the worst in people and also brought to the surface the worst types in society. He preferred to have nothing to do with it...'
What would have been Utopian enough for him?
'The closing down of the mines. The ploughing under of the vine-yards. The disbanding of the armed forces. The abolition of the automobile. Universal vegetarianism, Poetry in the streets. That sort of thing...'
'In other words, poetry and the horse-drawn cart and vegetarianism are worth fighting for, but not liberation from apartheid?'
Nothing is worth fighting for...because fighting only prolongs the cycle of aggression and retaliation.

It is a wonderful passage, reminiscent of that beautiful phrase towards the beginning of Waiting for the Barbarians in which his narrator reflects: “I believe in peace, perhaps even peace at any price.” It is this sort of simple-yet-laden-with-significance phrase which has marked Coetzee's career. He has that uncanny Hemingway-esque knack of striping things to their very essence and presenting them clearly, functionally, yet poetically.

That is why Coetzee's recent experimentation with complicated structure do not suit his work. As in Diary of a Bad Year the style serves only to hamper his fluent and poignant prose. The shifts in narration jar the reader. The most evocative and enjoyable passages are those annotated diary entries which make up the beginning and end of the book. Through them we travel back in time to a South Africa present in much of his fiction, a South Africa in which social atrocity is reflected in individual guilt, where things change yet everything seems to stay the same.

Most of all Summertime recounts the plateau in John Coetzee's life, before literary success transformed everything. It is a period in which he seems to be living the fate he always felt destined to live: “with an ageing parent in a house in the white suburbs with a leaky roof.” There is no sense that anything at all is about to change. And with his father just diagnosed with cancer, the book ends with the probability of many further years of struggle:

It used to be that he, John, had too little employment. Now that is about to change. Now he will have as much employment as he can handle, as much and more. He is going to have to abandon some of his personal projects and be a nurse. Alternatively, if he will not be a nurse, he must announce to his father: I cannot face the prospect of ministering to you day and night. I am going to abandon you. Goodbye. One of the other: there is no third way.
 
Summertime is over. Coetzee is about to achieve his first mainstream success with In the Heart of the Country. It is all beautifully set up for volume four of these wonderful fictionalised autobiographies. Summertime is the best book Coetzee has written since Youth was published seven years ago. It does not matter that there are big gaps which do not fit the reality of his biography. An entire marriage may have been wiped from the record books, as it was in Youth, but that only serves to make the blurring of fact and fiction more poignant. In style and character, one gets the feeling that this portrayal is true to the man Coetzee feels himself to be. It is this self aware honesty which has made his autobiographies such a joy to read. They take the ability to convey what it is like to be alive which is prevalent in all the best fiction and match it with a clarity of thought and analysis derived from biography and mesh them together. The result is a thoroughly readable account of the life of one of our greatest contemporary writers. I just hope a fourth volume is not too long coming.

7.5 out of 10

Slow Man - J.M. Coetzee

Read: December 2006

Cycling one day, Paul Rayment is hit by a careless young driver and after he ‘flew through the air with the greatest of ease’ finds his body maimed and his mind mired in the quicksand of regret. Nothing can lift his spirits until he employs a Croatian nurse and falls (absurdly) in love. When he succumbs to the myth that speaking ones love will transform his life, he finds himself leeching onto her surrogate family in the hope of rectifying his regrets. But when an elderly writer arrives to cast him as a character in her latest novel he is forced to listen to his conscience and analyse what is left of his disfigured life.

Coetzee loves getting into the minds of cantankerous old men whose staunch opposition to the mindset of the time leaves them adrift in a world they no longer see as their own. This is a typical Coetzee novel, full of his incisive analysis and evocative language; a good book, well worth reading.

5 out of 10

Life and Times of Michael K - J.M. Coetzee

Read: Feb 2008

In a country ripped apart by civil war, a simple gardener sets out to return his mother to her rural birthplace. But standing in the way of them is the vast bureaucracy of wartime administration: passes and permits and visas must be obtained, patiently waited for while social order gradually breaks down. Eventually they decide to walk, Michael pushing his mother in a modified wheelbarrow, following the roads and hiding in the undergrowth whenever a truck appears of the horizon. But Michael’s mother dies on the way, plugged into machines in a hospital while he is banished from her side. When he returns an overworked nurse hands him a box of ashes and he is left alone in a rapidly disintegrating world. So he retreats into the mountains, and the veld, vast empty spaces where he can be alone and live his own life, peaceful and untroubled by the wider world and its wars. After a time he is picked up and taken to a semantically disguised prison camp and forced to work for his living. But Michael is unable to stand this confinement and unwilling to break his back rebuilding a human world which everyone else seems to want to blow up and so he escapes and returns to his mothers place of birth, to join the long line of children in his family history, tending to the earth and hiding from everyone who comes his way.

Imagine the roving dogs of Disgrace and morph them into myriad different armies and battalions and you can picture the sort of anarchic yet dictatorial world Michael finds himself in. But he wants nothing to do with that absurd world; all he wishes is to be left alone to luxuriate in the peaceful natural world around him. To bend his head to the soil and crawl along, buglike, in the shadows as he encourages seeds to grow and live. He is a man of nature, doesn’t belong in such a harsh, fast world, and his will to survive on his own terms makes for an enthralling novel.

Coetzee’s Booker winning tale of incidental defiance is simply written, without pretence or fuss, just like its eponymous character. And in its simplicity all the facets of life are enunciated, so blindingly obvious it is wonder we cannot all follow them. His is a simple, universal truth. We follow Michael as he bounces from one man-made atrocity to another, never contaminated by the horrors of the world around him. Although at first he struggles to live – hunting, killing, cooking, storing – he is soon worn down by the pace of life and retreats into his own, internal and spiritual life, cut off from everyone else, living as if on a different timescale, a different planet, to the other characters.

Life and Times of Michael K is a beautiful novel. Coetzee’s impassioned tone implores sense into the world, urges the simpler things in life, the need for time and space and the importance of nature over and above the precarious structures man seeks to impose upon it. At its heart this is another of Coetzee’s paeans to South Africa, its immense, desolate land and the space it should offer. It may be set against a backdrop of apartheid civil war, but is never about divisive issues like race. Rather it honours the unique in us all, the common humanity and the uniform suffering of war. It is about the relationship between man and nature, between a gardener and his land, man-made clock time and the slowly ululating time of nature. As you read on it becomes increasingly obvious that Michael is not suited to life, that his style of simple living cannot survive in such a harsh world. He is both an intensely lovable and infuriatingly frustrating character, he has virtually no voice of his own, no inner monologue to commentate on the events he is experiencing, to make sense of his strange mind. Some may find this frustrating, and it certainly takes the emotional heart of the novel further away, just out of the readers grasp. But that is the point, what good would Michael K’s unique attitude to life be if he saw the world and talked about it and thought about it the way everyone else does. It is his refusal to take part in any aspect of common life which makes him such an enthralling character. As another reviewer writes (so coherently that I have to quote here):

“In a society in which a whole group of its citizens is accorded no value, what happens when one of them values himself even less? The answer: he becomes like a double negative; and double negatives become positives. 'The obscurest of the obscure,' as Coetzee puts it, 'so obscure as to be a prodigy.'”

Relating to Michael K is impossible, it would be like relating to God, or the Queen. Their entire plain of existence is so dramatically different as to be mind boggling. But it is beautiful just watching. And in the end it is a real delight to find such a profoundly resonant and understated final image: Michael, standing in his garden with a broken well before him, bending a tiny spoon, tying rope around it and drawing water from the earth one spoon at a time. “In that way,” he says, “one can live.”

8 out 10

Waiting for the Barbarians - J.M. Coetzee

Read: April 2008

“‘When some men suffer unjustly,’ I said to myself, ‘it is the fate of those who witness their suffering to suffer the shame of it.”

Set in the harsh, desolate frontier lands of a nameless Empire in a timeless age, Waiting for the Barbarians is a sparse, allegorical novel, devastatingly powerful in its depiction of one mans complicity in barbaric acts of so called ‘civilisation’.

For years the Magistrate has presided over the affairs of a small, peaceful frontier fort, collecting rents, settling petty disputes, and excavating the ruins of fallen towns, unconcerned about rumours of an impending war with the Barbarians. But when interrogators from the shadowy Third Bureau arrive it seems they are intent on turning his peaceful harmony into a raging battlefield. Following a case of barbaric torture, the Magistrate is jolted from his comfortable complicity into an act of quixotic rebellion for which he is imprisoned under charges of treason and he begins to learn just how lonely being a martyr can be.

Waiting for the Barbarians sees Coetzee tackling big issues: complacency and complicity in the face of barbarism, the boundary between freedom and incarceration, and the devastation war inflicts on both our psyches and ways of life. It is too easy to say it is an allegory for apartheid in South Africa - though undoubtedly it is – for Coetzee’s real success is in expanding theses small particulars, to a general treatise on human nature.

Many writers have meditated on the collision between conscientious individuals and harsh, repressive regimes. Kafka did it in The Trial, Camus in The Outsider, Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huzley in Brave New World, and the list goes on and on. If there is a twentieth century literary concern this is probably it. But Coetzee takes it that stage further than others, to analyse the complicity of the Magistrate himself, to question the arrogance of one man standing righteous against the tide of popular opinion, the pointlessness of it all. Coetzee doesn’t merely make his Magistrate a victim of the bureaucracy, but he is complicit within it, and knows even as he fights back that he is just doing so to cleanse his own narcissistic guilt. He is by no means a shining white night of freedom but a flawed person just trying to live his life in his own way.

Furthermore, the sense of place Coetzee creates is exquisite: the vast, empty wilderness a bleak uncompromising landscape looming ominously over the entire novel. The nomadic austerity of life in that wasteland strikes a chord with the barren emotional prospects of its central character. It is evocative of Doris Lessing’s Mara and Dan, an untamed world, shorn of romantic connotations, a greater threat to the lives of man than ever the Barbarians could be.

You don’t read Coetzee to enjoy a stroll through the park, you read Coetzee because, perhaps more than any other modern novelist, he knows what it is to be human, and he is able to convey it all so simply, in so few words that it leaves you stumped. You shake your head regularly, unsure whether you love or hate the characters, uncertain how such stripped down life can be portrayed so beautifully. Because above all else, Coetzee is a beautiful writer, his prose flows from pen to paper to reader invisibly, reads so smoothly you barely realise what an accomplishment it is. And he presents his situations starkly, vividly, but with an equanimity and reluctance that leaves you devastated. The scarcity of the prose, the barren landscape of possibility, the simple power of his storytelling, each of these is exquisite.

This is a very, very great novel. And despite everything it carries no message, save perhaps a call for recalcitrance in the face of force. As the Magistrate says, before any of the tragic events take place,

“I believe in peace, perhaps even peace at any price.”

You know what? I think I agree with him.


8.5 out of 10

Youth - J.M. Coetzee

Read: June 2008

Following his critically acclaimed childhood biography, Boyhood, Coetzee returns to the realms of fictionalised biography to chronicle his, well, youth. We find John in the middle of university, trying to reconcile his instinctive appreciation for the simplicity of maths with his yearning to be a poet. He is surrounded by youth, can imagine nothing outside it. In the best traditions of literature, he is the young man who dreams of being great but knows not where to begin, who sees life being lived all around him but has no idea how to be involved in it. As with Milan Kundera’s young poet Jaromil, life is always elsewhere, to be chased down and lived to the very fullest extent. Women are at best a mystery to him, he is socially uncomfortable and introverted. He wants to get away from the scenes of his childhood, but is not sure where exactly to go. Paris is the bohemian capital of poetic youth, but he speaks no French. So he opts for London, and heads off on a grand adventure, his chance to turn life into art.

It is the 1960’s, the worlds’ youth is living life to its fullest, finding colour and joy in creativity and free love. But in London, John just finds more of himself. He gets a job working as a computer programmer for IBM and is soon living a bland life of monotony with everyone else. He has a few loveless affairs which fail to inspire passion but otherwise lives an increasingly lonely life. But silently, almost impossibly for this genre of novel, young John is beginning to grow up.

Youth takes its title from Joseph Conrad’s great novella of romantic wonder and youth which ends with the immortal phrase: ‘Only a moment; a moment of strength, of romance, of glamour – of youth.’ And this is exactly what we have presented here: the transience of youth. There is not the comic satire of Milan Kundera’s Life is Elsewhere, nor the striving of a Dostoyevskyan character, or the raging anger of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, but what there is, is the possibility of future, of a life outside the absurdity of youth. As the novel draws to a close, things begin to work themselves out for John. He finds a job that he is relatively good at and from which he can gain some simple satisfaction, discovers he is pretty good at cricket, and has other talents of which he never suspected. He stops thinking that there is only one way to be a great poet, that he must live exactly like Flaubert or Pound in order to write great works. In short, he comes to realise that life cannot be lived prescriptively, cannot be worried about forever: after a while, you just have to get on with it.

This does not mean that he is suddenly talking mortgage prices and local schools. It is less specific than that. He is just growing up, evolving into his adult self. No longer fighting the world but letting it come to him. And what a pleasure these subtle changes are. Youth is one of the most focused portrayals of the temporary mindset of youth that you are likely to read. Like all Coetzee’s work, it is impeccably imagined, intelligent, graceful, and sparse. Poetic youth may be old literary ground, but Coetzee manages to say something original, something which has been long overdue saying. As a work of fiction Youth is engrossing, well characterised, and involving. As a biography of one of our greatest living authors, it demonstrates a clarity of self awareness which is both rare and a delight.

Coetzee is currently finishing off a sequel to Youth, for publication sometime in 2009 or 2010. I cannot wait to join John once more, to see how mature adulthood will find him. If it is anywhere near as perceptive as this, then it promises to be a very great work indeed.


7.5 out of 10

Disgrace - J.M.Coetzee

Rightfully regarded as the best Commonwealth novel of the 20 years, Disgrace tells the story of a white academic and his long, self-imposed, fall from grace in post-apartheid South Africa. Having spent years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, David Lurie finds himself outdated and old, no longer representative of the world him. Feeling increasingly resentful, he has an impulsive affair with a student but when it turns sour he is denounced and brought before an employment tribunal. Obstinate to the end, he refuses to repent publicly, preferring to retire and make himself a martyr for all that has been and passed.

Hoping that a spell of fresh air and honest work will silence the disquieting sense of loss which is beginning to engulf him he retreats to stay with his daughter on a ranch in the heart of the wilderness. But when they are victims of a vicious attack David comes to realise that age is not something which can be fought forever, that time waits for no man. This is a story about growing old disgracefully, about being left behind by history and finding oneself completely isolated in your home country. It is a journey into the modern Africa, and the very real heart of darkness which resides there. Through the relationship between Lurie and his daughter we see the terrible impossibility of white life in modern, black, South Africa.

It is fascinating to live the other side of the headlines and see the rollover legacy of post-apartheid political correctness. Along with Alan Paton’s Cry, The Beloved Country, Disgrace is a novel which simply resonates South Africa. Between them they are almost like a conversation being shouted across the years, separated by the history of the apartheid. It is a conversation about South Africa and its people, the terrible impossibility and the hesitant optimism, a country torn apart by years of racial tension which cannot be remedied simply by the abolition of privilege. The fault lines run much deeper than that.

Disgrace is beautifully written, quietly understated, elegiac and evocative. With its unique and powerful narrative and sense of untamed regret in untameable conditions it is one of the most beautiful books I have read. Take this phrase, how can writing achieve such simple magnitude?

“He sighs. The young in one another’s arms, heedless, engrossed in the sensual music. No country, this, for old men. He seems to be spending a lot of time sighing. Regret: a regrettable note on which to go out.”

I read Disgrace in one joyful afternoon which I will always treasure and strive to recreate. Beautiful snippets, little moments when life seems all at once in harmony. Like great novels they do not come along often and when they do, one must treasure them, for they are more valuable than gold.

9.5 out of 10

Diary of a Bad Year - J.M. Coetzee

Literary heavyweight J.M. Coetzee returns with… well I’m not exactly sure. Is it a fictionalised excuse for Coetzee to air his thoughts on the world we are living in? Is it a subtle critique of the idea that everyone should have ‘strong opinions’? Is it a biography of an aging man thinly veiled under the guise of fiction?

The plot revolves around a seventy year old writer (who happens to be Coetzee himself) who is asked to contribute to a book entitled ‘Strong Opinions’. He uses the opportunity to air his views on the world, writing essays on the nature of the state, Al Quaida, Tony Blair, and music. But he is losing muscle control in his arms and cannot type up his notes so he hires a beautiful young woman to act as his secretary come surreptitious muse. What ensues is typical old man fiction: slightly perverted, slightly pathetic. Familiar in a sense to the plots of both Disgrace and Slow Man but scaled down. It is a very short book.

Does that sound simple? I can assure you it anything but. Each page is separated into three separate sections: one the essays he is writing; one with his voice on what is happening; and one in the voice of his graceful young Philippino secretary. I am not sure if you are meant to read it page by page, or as three separate stories one after the other.

Overall it is billed as “a thoroughly contemporary novel” and in a way it is. It is post-modern in structure and airs views on the complex world we are living in. The essays are interesting, at times controversial and deeply philosophical. At one point he laments that no one reads political discourses anymore and you get the impression that this is really what he is trying to accomplish – but in a format that will reach a wider audience. If so that is a shame.

I enjoyed reading this but I fear it is a novel that will not live long in my mind. There are some really interesting topics discussed and as a work of non fiction it is intensely interesting, but as a novel, either I missed something, or it doesn’t really quite work.

4 out of 10

A week with J.M. Coetzee

This article is about 6 months old, but with December around the corner, I have been thinking back over the year, and this week in June stands out as one of the most remarkable. So I thought I would post this hear, and share with others a rare insight to J.M. Coetzee.

Here you go. Take a deep breath, and don't hate me for filling so many bites of the internet with my self indulgent rambling.

“Kill your idols” Bob Dylan urges, and I am generally of the same opinion. So how nice it is to meet a great writer and discover that, not only are they down to earth and friendly, but offer practical advice as well. This is my week with J.M. Coetzee, in all its brilliant banality.

John Coetzee (pronounced kert-zee-ah apparently) is one of the foremost authors of our generation. During a career that has spanned four decades, he has won the Booker Prize twice – for Life and Times of Michael K in 1983 and Disgrace in 1999 – and in 2003 was awarded the Novel Prize for Literature.

This year Disgrace has been shortlisted for the Best of Booker prize and is one of the most beautiful, unremittingly atmospheric and evocative books i have read. With its unique and powerful narrative and sense of untamed regret in untameable conditions, it has a fluency of prose and clarity of thinking which will make it a classic for many years to come.

But Coetzee’s genius doesn’t end there. Life and Times of Michael K is not only one of the most original novels ever to win the Booker prize, – the plot follows a quiet gardener as he tries to escape the civil war all around him by seeking the simplest, most natural life possible – but it ends with what has to be my favourite image in any book ever. Michael K, after days of walking, returns to his garden, bends a tiny spoon into the shape of a ladle, ties rope around the handle and dips it deep into an underground well, drawing water from the earth one spoon at a time. “In that way,” he says, “one can live.” Such stark, understated beauty; it resounds throughout much of Coetzee’s work.

And that is saying nothing for the harsh brutality of the landscape in Waiting for the Barbarians or the subtle culmination to Youth. In short, J.M. Coetzee is an original and intriguing author who always has something to say and whose writing demonstrates a near biblical simplicity of prose. He addresses the very core of what it is to be human, while at the same time showing real concern for the natural environment. He is one of the few absolutely indispensable authors of this, or any other, generation.

Friends, be warned: this column may hold some vague trace of bias.

So it was – thanks to the powers that be – that J.M. Coetzee, a man fabled for his reclusive nature, a man who has not done any public events in this country for a decade, came to spend a week in Norwich. He was here to participate in the New Writing Worlds festival/conference, to debate and discuss the central theme of this annual event: Human:Nature. The point of debate: what can words do for our world?

For 5 days I traipsed around Norwich, following in the footprints of all the writers, running bookstall after bookstall, quietly watching on as one of literature’s least accessible traditions (intellectual debate) sought to answer one of our most pressing issues (climate change). Many other writers were present: Richard Mabey, Mark Cocker and Jay Griffiths representing the nature writers; Mimi Khalvati, C.K. Williams and Adam Zagajewski appearing for the poets; Giles Foden, Susan Fletcher and Adam Thorpe defending the novelists; along with a whole host of the leading climate scientists and nature experts. But for the public it was all building up to the grand culmination: J.M. Coetzee’s reading and signing which would conclude the week.

However, that was not until Thursday. On Tuesday afternoon I was in a state of almost superhuman excitement at the prospect of meeting him, for he was to come in and sign some stock for us. I eagerly donned my most stylish attire and waited until 2.30 when he was scheduled to arrive. I had some questions prepared but doubted whether he would be willing to answer them. Would he be rudely reclusive, or plain boring? The sun was out, campus almost deserted. Two customers idly passed time browsing the shelves. 2:30 passed by. I began to fear that he may not be coming, and the faces of the few customers who had overheard the rumours noticeably sagged. But never fear, Coetzee was here, only a little late, dressed in a short sleeved polo shirt, posture as straight as an arrow, quietly confident demeanour expressed in everything about him, from the nod of greeting and warm handshake to the self deprecating way he dealt with my obsequious protestations.

“It is an absolute honour,” I managed to say, and led him to the back desk where we had a table set out. A bottle of water; two nice, new pens; 200 books waiting to be signed; an attentive, nervous bookseller to wait on his every need: what more could anyone require? Well, it seemed very little. He is an attractive man, with short greying beard and piercing brown eyes. As a colleague observed: “he is mighty good looking.” And he got to work immediately, throwing off provisos that he only need sign for as long or short as he wished. And, hesitantly, we began to strike up conversation.

John Coetzee is quiet and controlled, he does not speak rashly, takes ten, twenty, sometimes even thirty seconds to think over the question before he answers, in a calm, deep voice. As with his prose, he does not waste words. But he is not cold, his conversation demonstrates a man who engages completely with what is before him.

We began by discussing the debate the previous night, in which Giles Foden (author of the Last King of Scotland amongst others) was pushed into a corner and asked to defend the novel (in its general sense) on the same level as that of scientific certainty, or political agency. This was unfair, he contended, a novel is not about absolute fact, it works on a less specific plane which does not seek to shout the loudest, but to slowly build a picture which permeates the reader through a process not unlike osmosis. If you set out to write a novel like a lecture on climate change you are doing nothing more than the Socialist Realists in the USSR, who sought to create writers who were “engineers of the soul,” whose purpose was to participate in the grand building of socialism. And how many socialist realist novels survive today?

And the suggestion that literature hasn’t already engaged with the natural world was treated with equal disdain. If Michael K isn’t a novel about living peaceably with nature then I don’t know what is.

Piles of signed books began to take over the table. We continued our chat, which I have paraphrased below.

SR: You moved to Australia in 2001. Do you have any desire to return to South Africa?

JMC: No.

SR: Are you still drawn to writing about the South Africa landscape in any way?

JMC: No.

SR: Do you have any plans to write about the Australian landscape?

JMC: No. I moved there too late in life to have an understanding of that landscape.

SR: Is there any one of your novels which stands out as your favourite?

JMC: No. I don’t think it is good to have a favourite. An author’s favourite book should always be the next one you are going to write.

SR: So what is your next project?

JMC: I am just finishing off a sequel to Youth. It should be published sometime in 2009.

SR: Oh wow, I just started reading that an hour ago. At one point you question the relationship between prose and poetry. Your character asks himself: “Is that what prose secretly is: the second best choice, the resort of failing creative spirits?” Is this really how you feel about prose?

JMC: Yes it is. I think prose is much easier than poetry, when you are writing a novel and the dialogue and plot are working well then you can almost go into automatic pilot. With poetry one has to be in a state of existence at all times, if you come out of it then the rhythm is lost.

SR: Romantic poetry is a big part of Disgrace and many of your works. And moving on to Disgrace, I was struck by how much it reminded my of Alan Patton’s Cry, The Beloved Country. It is as though they are carrying on a conversation across the years, one pre-apartheid, and the other post-apartheid. In each of them you have the terrible impossibility and the hesitant optimism, the struggle against forces greater than the individual, yet the individual, personal life being the only way of living. Was this conscious?

JMC: No, I was not conscious of it. (Clearly this was a question he disagreed with.)

SR: Diary of a Bad Year is a strange sort of hybrid between fiction and non-fiction, with the narratives completely interlocked. When I was reading it I was unsure whether to read it page by page or flick back and forth to follow the individual stories through to their conclusion. Did you have an idea of how you wanted it to be read yourself?

JMC: No. The purpose of it was to leave that completely for the reader to determine.

Now the conversation took a slightly unexpected twist. Perhaps he was getting tired of my questions, perhaps he wanted me to shut-up, but he decided to turn the conversation around and ask me some questions. Had I been a student here (yes,) what had I studied (History and Politics,) and what did I want to do with my life (well…). Each question carried what seemed his genuine interest, and real engagement. When I hesitantly said that I was writing a novel (well, who isn’t these days!) and that it was partly set in Australia with leanings towards Aboriginal mythology he smiled, asked what had drawn me to that, and whether I had heard of a man named B Wongar. I had not. So he informed me, like that teacher you have always wanted, the expert dispensing little gems of knowledge, that B Wongar is a Serbian author who emigrated to Australia and lived with tribal Aborigines for many years. He published a series of books on Aboriginal life and mythology which were presumed to have been written by a native, and only later did it emerge who the author actually was.

Delighted, I thanked him greatly and said I would check him out as soon as possible. (I have since learned that B Wongar published many books, none of which are in print in this country any more.) I said I had been reading David Unaipon’s work and he replied that he had a picture of David Unaipon in his wallet. (David Unaipon was a turn of the century writer and inventor and one of the first Aborigines to put down on paper the legends and customs of his race. As such, he played a major role in demonstrating the validity of Aboriginal culture and breaking down the barriers between natives and the Christian settlers.) So out he whipped his wallet and as he was doing so I remembered, David Unaipon is the man on the Australian $50 note! A laugh, a smile. John Coetzee carries around a fair few dollars…

His engagement in the conversation was enthralling, his genuine, down-to-earth and unpretentious manner a real pleasure. During our various literary festivals we have hosted many celebrated and world famous authors – Salman Rushdie, Doris Lessing, Isabel Allende, Louis de Bernieres, Margaret Attwood, Junot Diaz, Rose Tremain, Iain Banks among them – and although they are often nice, friendly and warm, there was something about the calm way Coetzee spoke which struck me.

And then, all too soon, he had signed all the books he possibly could, and with a friendly handshake, he departed, walking purposefully down the street, back to his temporary student accommodation.

Two days later J.M. Coetzee returned to give his reading/lecture. He talked about the issue of censorship and how, recently, it has moved from being a general consideration of his, to something more intimately personal. It is a fascinating and informative lecture which I have reproduced here, non verboten.

JMC:

I have always been interested in the relationship between censor and writer; it is both incredibly intimate and yet at the same time undesired, like having a strangers eye upon you. I began writing in South Africa in the 1970’s, in a historical situation in which censorship was official, and controlled. Most fiction was published initially in London and then re-imported back to South Africa where it would be checked by the “expert readers” at the censors.

This censorship essentially had two aims: to demonstrate and maintain power for the state, and to preserve the moral integrity and purity of South African society. The essence of the latter being the dichotomy between good and evil, white and black.

By this time, South Africa had moved from a utopian phase which sought to isolate itself and preserve “God’s peace”, to a more realpolitik stance whose aims were to gain security and power by playing the superpowers off against each other.

My second and third novels, In the Heart of the Country, and Waiting for the Barbarians were both published in London and then passed the censors and allowed back into South Africa. End of story, one might think. But it was not so.

In 1994, following the end of Apartheid, the national archives were opened up and unlike many other autocratic regimes, very few of the files were destroyed. Then, last year, in 2007, I received a phone call from South Africa asking whether I would like to read the Internal Censors reports on my books. “Of course” I replied and a couple of weeks later they arrived.

Here are some extracts from them:

In The Heart of the Country

Read by 4 censors.

Although there are examples of sex across the colour divide, this book is “outstandingly written” and will be “read and discussed only by intellectuals.”

There are 13 questionable passages found, mostly involving cross colour sex. One censor wrote that this is “no enjoyable recreational reading.” Another, that the book was a “difficult, obscure, multi-levelled work.”

Waiting for the Barbarians on the other hand had only one censor. Although there were 22 instances of undesirable content, it was noted that the novel is “set in a desert somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere, no-where near South Africa.”

That it “lacks popular appeal” and was thoroughly “sombre – unrelieved by any lighter touches”.

Life and Times Michael K

“Deals with sensitive issues in South Africa.”

“Although it is situated in South Africa, the tragedy of Michael K is universal.”

All this is interesting, it provides an insight into the thought processes of the censors. But it is also pretty expected. What was less expected was to see the names on the censors reports…

They were not Orwellian bureaucrats who wore dull suits and trudged to work in bland, concrete office buildings where they punched out at 5.30 on the button and went home to their solitary lives. They were, to all eyes, normal citizens. One was the mother of one of my colleagues at the university of Cape Town. I had met with her many times. Two others were lecturers at the university, one when I was a student, the other a colleague of mine.

It turns out that they were my contemporaries and colleagues, people whose houses he had visited for barbecues and the like. I had shared hotdogs with my censors!

Now this is not wholly surprising given that there was a small intellectual community in Cape Town and the censorship bureau was located there. But nonetheless, to be judged so clearly by colleagues and have absolutely no idea of it was a strange discovery.

But then the question became apparent. Were the censors on my side? Did they edit their reviews in order to benefit me? Many censors across the world have done their work based on particular extracts from books, but it appears with me at least, they chose to consider the overall tendency of the book. Was this to benefit me, or the way the censors regularly operated. Were they making me an exception, or did our censors really believe that the overall quality of a work made up for transgressions in what was considered morally acceptable?

I will never know, because all the censors who read these books are now dead. But it is interesting to get an insight into the minds, and identities of censorship, and who would have thought that something like censorship could be so invisible even to those whose work is actually being censored.

John Coetzee went on to read from two of his books, In the Heart of the Country and Waiting for the Barbarians, reading passages which had been flagged as unseemly. When he finished, he signed books for 45 minutes, satisfied the eager excitement of over 200 customers (many with first edition hardbacks of his early work which made me incredibly jealous!), and then we shook hands and he left. It was an interesting week spent with John Coetzee and all the others. Most importantly, it was interesting for its normality. Great writers are rarely the astounding people we picture them as, and they are all the better for it. John Coetzee is a quiet, reclusive author, one I feel privileged to have met, and whose advice and interest I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

Congratulations for reading through to the end. As a reward, have a virtual chocolate bar on me…