The South African and Australian novelist John Maxwell Coetzee is one of most decorated English-language authors in the world. The double Booker prize winner and Nobel laureate may not be for everyone – Martin Amis once said that Coetzee had “no talent” – but his spare novels about power structures and humanity have won him a dedicated fanbase. The 83-year-old has been writing for almost 50 years, so those new to him have plenty to choose from. Will Forrester suggests some good ways in.
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The entry point
JM Coetzee’s third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, is his first masterpiece. The story of an impending frontier conflict, an official of an unnamed empire and the reverberations of his small, equivocal shift from oppressive apathy to complex sympathy with the oppressed, the novel explores ideas that would preoccupy Coetzee for the following four decades. It’s about power and authority, purpose and futility, sexual problematics, linguistic borders, literary reworking and the vicissitudes of kindness and cruelty.
It’s also about colonialism and the South Africa of its age, even if it eschews real places and people. Coetzee’s archive spills this secret: there you’ll find drafts of Waiting that reference Cape Town, the Karoo, and Steve Biko. Like so many of Coetzee’s novels, it’s a negotiation between the situated and the universal, the psychological and the material – or between the untethered literary play of his fifth novel, Foe, and the searingly direct address of apartheid of his sixth, Age of Iron. Those two books do their thing excellently; Waiting manages to be both.
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The Marmite one
Coetzee’s “Jesus trilogy” has divided critics. In the Observer, Alex Preston, reviewing its final instalment, The Death of Jesus, described the trilogy as “bizarre”, whilein the Guardian, Steven Poole praised its “delicate, iridescent mystery”. The two readings do share some common ground, agreeing that the book is confounding, slippery and, for better or worse, frustrating. To me it’s all these things but it’s also a fine example of an older Coetzee’s interest in individual emotion.
The trilogy features David, a young boy who migrates to a Spanish-speaking shore with an unremembered past; Simón and Inés, his proxy parents; and the characters they encounter as David moves between towns and educational institutions. It isn’t a spoiler per se to reveal that the third novel features the boy on his deathbed, his mysterious, prodigal mission unfulfilled. And in this poignant, sometimes amusing exploration of parent-child relationships, youthful fragility and brilliance cut short, we find a Coetzee interested not just in the philosophy of life, but also the raw humanity of life. Reading the book’s crushingly spare closing lines (“A pity”), it’s hard for frustration not to yield to a wrenching sadness.
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The one for dog lovers
Coetzee is uncommonly good at inhabiting people. His ability to do the same with animals is perhaps rarer still. Read Disgrace for its dogs, the Jesus trilogy for David’s loyal hound Bolívar, and, of course, The Lives of Animals. Once you’ve done so, The Dog, first published in the New Yorker and now included in English versions of The Pole and Other Stories, is a compelling short story. Without a wider intimacy with Coetzee’s canines, it might feel thin, plodding, or obvious. With it, one feels the torsions of language, compassion, race, existence and terror of which his dogs are both symbolic and real representation. “The dog hurls himself at the fence. One day, the dog says, this fence will give way. One day, the dog says, I will tear you to pieces.”
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The stomach turner
A book with the power to induce nausea is probably a compelling book. Life & Times of Michael K has this faculty. Against the backdrop of civil war, Michael K leaves Cape Town with his ailing mother. By the time he reaches their destination – her birthplace, a farm near Prince Albert – she has become ashes. He sprinkles these remains on the earth, growing from them melons and pumpkins on which he subsists. “All that remains is to be a tender of the soil.” Michael and the novel are continually beset by conflict and cruelty and, amid it, it’s this garden to which everything returns. One way to sum up Life & Times is this: it’s a story of eating and not eating, being and not being. And it’s these things that bring on nausea: the physical queasiness summoned by Coetzee’s plain renderings of stomach-turning moments; and a Sartrean existential nausea with which Michael and we the readers are struck.
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If you want to get to know the author
Coetzee has not written a memoir. He has, however, written three increasingly fictionalised memoirs in novel form: Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime. They are excellent books – particularly Summertime, in which the fictional John Coetzee has died – but, having read them, we’re left with a sense of knowing less about the real man than we started with.
If you want to get to know the real Coetzee, his 2003 book, Elizabeth Costello, is a better bet. Here, Australian author Costello (who crops up frequently in Coetzee’s post-2000 work) gives a series of lectures covering, among other things, vegetarianism, censorship, cultural institutions, literary reception, and the great philosophers. These are of course some of Coetzee’s enduring interests – and this “novel” is really a framed collection of lectures and essays the writer has delivered elsewhere. It’s all rather Coetzeean that we learn more about him through his fictional character Elizabeth than we do from his autofictional double John.
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The one to give a miss
Slow Man sees Paul Rayment convalesce after losing a leg in a cycling accident. It’s Coetzee’s first book after winning the Nobel, and it’s full of his usual stuff: literary allusion, language barriers and the author Elizabeth Costello. But none of these facets really shine. Yes, this is a book self-professedly interested in slowness and grimness. But the thoughtful interrogation of these ideas doesn’t quite override how grim and slow it is to read.
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If you only read one
Disgrace won Coetzee a second Booker (and, arguably, the Nobel) for good reason. A novel between salvation and ruin, between the politically large and the personally small, between moral bankruptcy and bailout, it is Coetzee the prose stylist at his finest; Coetzee the literary philosopher at his sharpest; and Coetzee the novelist driven by capturing what Harold Pinter called “the real truth of our lives and societies,” and maybe getting the closest to finding it.
• The Pole and Other Stories is out now in Australia and will be published in the UK in October (Vintage £20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges apply.
