Having already won the South African Literary Award for best novel in Snyckers’ motherland, Lacuna publishes in Ireland now on a wave of critical acclaim. Previously the author has written several young-adult novels and a thriller, but this time Snyckers has embarked upon a feminist response to Disgrace, the masterpiece by Nobel Prize winner JM Coetzee.
This is a formidable undertaking that presents many difficult challenges for the author that are not easily resolved. In Snyckers’s novel, Lucy Lurie, the victim of a brutal sexual assault in Disgrace, becomes the subject, critiquing her own lack of agency in Coetzee’s account of what happened.
Suffering from debilitating PTSD, Lucy becomes obsessed with Coetzee and is determined to set the record straight. She believes that she is the lacuna that Coetzee left out of his novel – the missing piece of the puzzle. The intertextuality between the two works raises complex questions about the appropriation of the stories of others, authorship and creative licence.
There is, of course, a long tradition of authors offering alternative perspectives on pre-existing texts – revising or adjusting the lens through which we view a narrative. Jean Rhys, for example, in Wide Sargasso Sea, the feminist and postcolonial prequel to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, illuminates the source material, but the novel also operates as a literary triumph in its own right. Lacuna is less convincing in this regard. To appreciate Snyckers’s work, it is important to know Coetzee’s – not least so that the reader can observe when Lacuna misrepresents what happens in the original novel.
Lucy is an unreliable narrator, and so these divergences are presumably a deliberate choice on the author’s part to highlight her state of mind. If Lacuna is to operate as a form of fictional literary criticism, however, misrepresenting the text it challenges is problematic. Those who are familiar with Coetzee may find this premise an intriguing foil to Disgrace – there is definitely much to ponder in this ambitious, thought-provoking companion piece.
As a stand-alone new creation, however, it struggles to escape from the shadow of its predecessor. If you are tempted by Lucy Lurie, and she is a spirited, challenging protagonist to spend time with, invest in Disgrace first and your experience will be all the richer for it.
