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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
There are people who think of J. M. Coetzee as a cold writer, and he might agree, or pretend to agree. "If he were a warmer person he would no doubt find it all easier: life, love, poetry," he writes of himself in his memoir "Youth." "But warmth is not in his nature." The protagonist of Coetzee's new novel, "Diary of a Bad Year" (Viking; $24.95), is, like his creator, an aging South African novelist resident in Australia, who muses at one moment that his father surely thought him a selfish child "who has turned into a cold man." His art, he laments, is "not great-souled." It lacks "generosity, fails to celebrate life, lacks love."
Yet this is the cold air just beyond the reach of a fire. Coetzee's chaste, exact, ashen prose may look like the very embers of restraint, but it is drawn, again and again, to passionate extremity: an uneducated gardener forced to live like an animal off the South African earth ("Life & Times of Michael K"); a white woman dying of cancer while a black township burns, and writing, in her last days, a letter of brutal truths to her daughter ("Age of Iron"); a white woman raped on her farm by a gang of black men, and impregnated ("Disgrace"); a recent amputee, the victim of a road accident that mangled a leg, helpless in his Adelaide apartment, and awkwardly in love with his Croatian nurse ("Slow Man"). Coetzee seems compelled to test his celebrated restraint against subjects and ideas whose extremity challenges novelistic representation.
The excessiveness of witnessed cruelty produces a corresponding excess of shame. In "Disgrace," for instance, David Lurie is locked in a bathroom by the intruders while they rape his daughter. Lurie is a disgraced academic--he had an affair with a student and has lost his job--but his real disgrace begins after this episode. He starts helping out at an animal clinic run by a friend of his daughter's. He cannot get used to seeing the countless numbers of dogs put down and then cremated; he will cremate the animals himself rather than watch the workmen casually breaking the legs of the corpses to make them fit better into the furnace. Why does he do it? It is not rational. He does it, he decides, for himself: "For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing." In Coetzee's "Elizabeth Costello," the title character, an august Australian novelist, argues that the daily slaughter of animals is morally comparable to the Holocaust. When a college president wonders if Costello's vegetarianism is born of moral conviction, she explains that it "comes out of a desire to save my soul."
In Coetzee's work, emotions like shame, guilt, and disgrace surge beyond rational discussion just as cruelty surges beyond bearable depiction. And here, in his latest novel, another novelist protagonist gives voice to a feeling of unbearable shame, this time at the Bush Administration's connivance at torture:
Their shamelessness is quite extraordinary. Their denials are less than half-hearted. . . . The issue for individual Americans becomes a moral one: how, in the face of this shame to which I am subjected, do I behave? How do I save my honour?
Later, this protagonist asserts that...
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