Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life by J.M. Coetzee Secker & Warburg 166pp, £12.99 in UK
Imagine a childhood, any childhood, and the story can be either an exercise in nostalgia or a chronicle of unrelenting hardship starring the teller/survivor as hero. The South African novelist J.M. Coetzee, whose novels include Waiting for the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K, Foe, Age of Iron, The Master of Saint Petersburg, is far too gifted a writer as well as too disciplined an individual to stumble into such traps. Boyhood is as funny, cruel and terrifying as life itself. It is also intense and elegant, clearly the product of the complex, subtle imagination which shapes Coetzee's outstanding fiction.
Loosely spanning his experiences from the age of ten until 13, the story of the young John is told is the third person. The voice is remote and detached, yet at times desperate, ringing with self-disgust, guilt, fear of exposure and the whiff of shame. Although not a confessional book, it possesses a vivid urgency which is sustained by the use of the continuous present tense. The boy is both tyrant and coward. "He is a liar and he is cold-hearted too: a liar to the world in general, cold hearted to his mother."
Central to his world is his love/ hate relationship with his mother who, disappointed by life, has committed herself to the pursuit of motherhood as martyrdom. While the boy resents "her blinding, overwhelming, self sacrificial ove", he also resents any small freedom she may have. When she acquires a bike which she can hardly ride, he watches her and realises: "He does not want her to have a desire of her own. He wants her always to be in the house, waiting for him when he comes home." Viewing his family with disdain, he also resents them. "He shares nothing with his mother" and decides "he is too close to his mother, his mother is too close to him". As for his other parent, "he has never worked out the position of his father in the household", while his younger brother merely inhabits the same house. Ruling his home like an unhappy little prince - "an irascible despot" and far from a star on the playing field - the boy makes the classroom his main stage, the scene of his anxious triumphs.
Fated to come first in every exam, he also lives in fear of being beaten by his crazy teachers yet is tormented by the shame of not being slapped, a fact which sets him apart from his classmates. Far from being a time of "innocent joy", as the Children's Encyclo- paedia tells him it should be, childhood for him is "a time of gritting the teeth and enduring".
Failure finally catches up with him when at summer camp he proves incapable of lighting a fire. More significant is his rescue from a swimming accident during which he imagines his mother "sitting on a chair with a high, straight back reading the letter that tells of his death". The fact that he survives leaves him convinced that "there is something special about him. He should have died but he did not. Despite his unworthiness, he has been given a second life."
The boy lives in his mind, in a near-religious state of anxiety. Most of his dramas and fantasies are played out in his own head. Few real incidents are recorded. Of course, he remembers his dog's death; the joy of riding a bike; the fun of playing cricket all day; of dreading PE class; of all the days he pretended to be ill in order to stay home from school and read. But the real story is the intensity of remembered sensations, of the almost physical quality of speculating about fear and discovery. He acts out elaborate secrets, such as pretending to be Catholic. His Afrikaans classmates are not prepared to leave him to his fantasies and decide he is Jewish and beat him up, while the Catholics "nag him and make sneering remarks". Added to the dangers of lying about his religion is an even darker secret, that of favouring the Russians over the Americans. Ever hovering in the background is the story of his family, particularly, of his father's fall from social grace and gradual loss of dignity which culminates with the boy standing by the man's bed beside which is a chamber pot "in which cigarette-stubs float in brownish urine. He has not seen anything uglier in his life." His father also has secrets, such as pretending to go the office only to return home by mid-morning for private drinking. Conscious that "that man" is in the house, the boy wonders has he committed suicide. "But if he has committed suicide, would it not be best to pretend not to notice, so that the sleeping-pills or whatever he has taken can be given time to act?"
The episode reflects both the pragmatic cunning and the innocence of the boy as well as the subtle, tight-lipped, black humour and obsessive intelligence which runs through the narrative. On being transferred to a new school when the family move to Capetown, the boy is finally faced with a serious challenger for first place in the class. His previous academic glory is endangered by Oliver, "a worthy opponent". Suddenly our anti-hero's "old vow always to take home a first-place report becomes a matter of grim private honour". Young John's academic reputation is saved, however, when Oliver stops coming to school and conveniently dies. "The threat has receded," we are told, "he breathes more easily; but the old pleasure in coming first is spoiled."
The boy who calmly reports mangling his brother's hand in a grinder and remembers hoovering a trail of ants, "sucking them up to their death", also recalls the smiling red goblin on the "roaring belly" of that same vacuum cleaner and the "papery red skins of the peanuts" doled out at his school break. He is also the boy who was the all-powerful baby "his mother holds . . . advancing into the world".
As austerly beautiful as would be expected of Coetzee the artist, Boyhood, as much novel as memoir, catches the random, of-the-moment quality of memory, while its aloof, edgy grace and seething passion ensures the narrative is both truthful and mysterious.