Intellectual dissection of mortality becomes a bore
October 27, 2005 Edition 1
Jeremy Gordin
When it comes to books, I, being an insufferably opinionated sort of person, generally and quickly know exactly what I like and what I don't. But, as far as J M Coetzee's latest book is concerned, I must admit that for a long time I found the ragged and ageing jury of my mind to be well and truly still out.
Was it another fine work from the 2003 Nobel literature laureate? Or a damp squib? Or, even worse, a little bit of a bore?
Yes, I know: one has to take Coetzee on his own terms, and he does not tell a straight story. He is forever playing little mind games, such as, for example, having an alter ego who is an ageing, female Australian novelist. And he is almost always derivative in one way or another.
Waiting for the Barbarians flowed from, among other things, the famous C P Cavafy poem, its ambience, and the general ambience of Cavafy's full oeuvre. Life & Times of Michael K owes more than a little to Franz Kafka and his Joseph K. Foe was "about" Daniel Defoe and Robinson Crusoe (as well as feminism).
Boyhood and Youth have strong connections with, and the same titles as Leo Tolstoy's autobiographical memoirs. What Coetzee writes is a (generally wry) comment on, an addition to, what used to be called in university literature departments (and may still be) "the tradition".
To be sure, Coetzee is a post-modernist. He plays the games mentioned above, he alludes to and embroiders on the tradition, and he flits between genres; the major part of Elizabeth Costello is openly based on a number of non-fictional papers delivered by Coetzee in the United States.
In short, for those of us who still enjoy a good, old-fashioned tale, Coetzee may seem to be overly determined, too self-conscious, too caught up in cerebral wiggles - or, as a colleague of mine succinctly put it (though she was not referring to Coetzee), too far up his own bum.
Yet, as some hippie once surely said (or maybe it was a famous existentialist?), if it is what gets you through the night, it must be okay. And I have mostly found Coetzee to be an excellent writer and thinker indeed, with a wicked and droll sense of humour to boot. I thought Age of Iron and Disgrace were brilliant, and found his sparse quasi-autobiographical books, Boyhood and Youth, equally so.
What's more, I most of all enjoyed Elizabeth Costello - which is as much a book of "philosophy" and diatribe about animal rights as it is a novel, and introduced to the world Coetzee's alter ego, Costello.
So what then about Slow Man? The reader is barrelling along nicely in this book, travelling as swiftly and smoothly as a competent cyclist, when Bam! - we get hit very hard, almost as hard, say, as a cyclist being struck by a motor car.
The analogy is not gratuitous. This new book begins with Paul Rayment, a keen cyclist in his 60s, being hit by a young speedster. The doctors cannot save Rayment's leg and amputate it.
Suddenly the life of Rayment, an Australian (though not a "comfortable" one - he still feels very strongly the presence of his French antecedents), is faced with a life as truncated as his body is. He feels completely humiliated, very bitter, and he is very stubborn, refusing to wear a prosthesis.
However, he hires a nurse called Marijana Jokic, a Croatian immigrant who ministers to his needs without infringing on his privacy and with whom he falls in love, notwithstanding her ostensibly happy marriage, her three kids, and her spreading waistline and yellow teeth.
So far, so good. This is not unfamiliar territory. Even if we know little about Coetzee, even if we do not know that he is an avid and disciplined cyclist (which he is), even if we do not know that he is 65 and a few years ago emigrated from South Africa to Australia (which he did), we do know that he writes about people in extremis - about shame and loneliness.
Then we reach chapter 13, which is about 79 pages into this 263-page book, and suddenly a novelist called Elizabeth Costello comes to call on Rayment. And we realise that at the same time that this is Rayment's story, it is also a book about the act of writing a book.
It becomes clear that, while Rayment is "real" in terms of the book at hand, he is also one of Costello's characters, one whom she is having trouble getting to do what she thinks he ought to do. But, of course, Costello is not "real" (any more than Rayment is); she is a product of the real author's imagination.
Interestingly, the two people - (unreal) author versus character - irritate each other intensely and fight a lot. "Now let me ask you straight out. Mrs Costello: "Are you real?" To which Costello replies: "Of course I am real. As real as you."
So the game is on. We have a story within a story, the "inside" story being a meditation on the imagination and creation, and so on and so forth, with the ostensible story being Rayment's.
His story is interesting, or potentially interesting. He is, as American critic Benjamin Strong has pointed out, an "obsolete dissident" - as, it might be suggested, is Coetzee. Consider the general reaction (especially the ANC establishment's) some years ago to Disgrace.
Rayment's story is also about age, mortality and love. When we love someone else whom or what do we love? Do we love that person's spirit or do we love his or her physical carapace? Why then would it be so difficult to care for someone without a limb?
Because it is - consider Rayment's experiences with Jokic and others. And why does he love Jokic, despite her apparent unattractiveness, when a far more comely young woman is put at his disposal by Costello?
The theme of exile is also picked up in this book. Rayment hails from France and does not much care for Australia where he has lived most of his life. "Home is the place where the fire burns in the hearth, where you come to warm yourself," Rayment says. "I seem to be cold wherever I go." That is, Rayment has no country and nor does Coetzee.
The Master of Cape Town, as Strong has also suggested, can never go home.
But, in the end, the book deteriorates into the difficulties encountered by Rayment with the Jokic family and, though I hesitate to say this, it all becomes as damp as a rainy day with nothing to do.
It seems as though Coetzee became bored with his central character and story, then introduced Costello, but still grew bored. And, in the end, though I allowed the book many days to jell, I am sorry to say that this reader became very bored as well.
