Fiction:In JM Coetzee's disturbing new novel, age comes up against the self-contained cruelty of youth and beauty, writes Eileen Battersby
Time passes. Initially it is a barrier to be crossed, like having to wait too many days for Christmas when you are young. But gradually, what had once moved slowly starts racing by, becoming a diminishing commodity.
Finally, it expires, and impatience turns to bewilderment. All the energy, urgency, even the anger of life, fades. This is a bizarre book, overseen by the ghost of Nabokov; part meditation, part confession, it is a farewell to waning creative and/or sexual powers. It is also an acceptance of loss. It is disturbing, at times unsettlingly candid. An older woman becomes invisible, but an ageing man enters the world of the sexless and, with it, the comic.
The 2003 Nobel literature laureate, JM Coetzee, is one of the world's finest writers. Several of his novels, including In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Booker winners The Life and Times of Michael K (1983) and Disgrace (1999), as well as The Master of Petersburg (1994), represent the finest, most truthful fiction of the second half of the 20th century.
He is the hunger artist, one who chronicled the slow death of South African apartheid while remaining true to the concept of fiction as an art form.
Coetzee saw the polemic yet always heard the music, and remained alert to the vagaries of human behaviour. Diary of a Bad Year is unusual in form, a three-hander more suited to the theatre than the page. In it, the central narrator, a famous South African writer who now lives in Australia, has agreed to participate in a project: he is to contribute his thoughts on a number of subjects for inclusion in a book. A clever German publisher has devised "Strong Opinions", a volume of thoughts, random musings, perfect for a world in which the mind must be allowed to wander and there is a market for it.
So far, so good. Artists tend to have opinions; writers are well used to writing such ideas and beliefs down. They articulate their attitudes. Thinking is as natural as breathing, but with time, the physical act of writing it all down becomes more difficult. The eyes no longer see as clearly; the hands are not as quick. The central narrator responds to the project and, effortlessly, or so it seems, has prepared a number of essays on various subjects, such as anarchism, democracy, terrorism, al-Qaeda, the slaughter of animals, paedophilia, Guantánamo Bay. The problem is, he needs a typist.
PERHAPS HE KNEW he needed the typist before he noticed Anya, the young woman in the laundry room of the apartment building of which they were both tenants: "My first glimpse of her was in the laundry room. It was mid-morning on a quiet spring day and I was sitting, watching the washing go around, when this quiet startling young woman walked in." He then sees himself through her eyes as a "crumpled old fellow . . . who at first glance might have been a tramp off the street". Very quickly, the narrative settles into a composite of themes that have come to dominate the Yeatsian Coetzee's recent fiction, most particularly Slow Man (2003), in which the central character, having lost a leg in a freak cycling accident, realises he has suddenly joined the ranks of the elderly and has been dismissed as too old to operate on. He also discovers a desperate need to learn to love before it is too late. In this new book, the writer already knows what has happened to him: "As I watched her an ache, a metaphysical ache, crept over me that I did nothing to stem. And in an intuitive way she knew about it, knew that in the old man in the plastic chair in the corner there was something personal going on, something to do with age and regret and the tears of things." Age comes face to face with the self- contained cruelty of youth and beauty.
At the top of each page, the essays unfold; thoughts chase each other, perceptions and observations about a world that is in flux. They represent the thought processes of a thinker and critic. Coetzee is both. The middle and lower sections are less lofty and contain the human drama, the uneasy tensions as the writer attempts to establish a rapport with his shrewd, sexually knowing typist who plays upon her attractions. She is flattered but also provocative: "Why does the English need to be spelled right anyway if it is going to be translated into German?"
Even more perceptively, Anya, the superficially educated daughter of a diplomat, asks the writer: "Why do you write this stuff? Why don't you write another novel instead? Isn't that what you are good at, novels?"
His answer is interesting, possibly deliberately revealing: "A novel? No. I don't have the endurance any more. To write a novel you have to be like Atlas, holding up a whole world on your shoulders and supporting it there for months and years while its affairs work themselves out. It is too much for me as I am today . . . Nowadays I get tired. My attention wanders."
OBVIOUSLY ONE WONDERS who is speaking: Coetzee's character or Coetzee himself? It deliberately raises the issue of exactly how is this narrative intended to be? Meanwhile, Anya's boyfriend, Alan, a predictably nasty piece of work, older than his 30-year-old girlfriend but younger (as a fortysomething professional) than the 72-year-old writer, has neither mercy nor sentiment to spare for the older man. The reader ends up caught in the crossfire. The couple at first use the old man's obvious sexual desire as a stimulant, but then Alan becomes irritated, even jealous and, ultimately, sufficiently calculating to render the writer-narrator vulnerable and increasingly sympathetic.
Yet there are several moments when the writer wins the reader purely through his intellectual responses to experience: "A few days ago I heard a performance of the Sibelius fifth symphony. As the closing bars approached, I experienced exactly the large, swelling emotion that the music was written to elicit. What would it have been like, I wondered, to be a Finn in the audience at the first performance of the symphony in Helsinki nearly a century ago, and feel that swell overtake one?"
As the writer becomes more embroiled in the tension existing between the couple and also at the hostility directed by Alan at himself, he continues to offer and shape his opinions for publication, and for his own consideration: "The best proof we have that life is good, and therefore that there may perhaps be a God after all, who has our welfare at heart, is that to each of us, on the day we are born, comes the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. It comes as a gift, unearned, unmerited, for free."
The writer may lust in a half-hearted, almost anthropological way after the indolent typist, but the person to whom he would most like to speak "just once" is Bach. He also wonders why it is Bach and not Schubert to whom he wants to speak.
NEAR THE CLOSE of this dark and not particularly appealing book, the writer considers reading and points out how established classics possess the capacity to emerge "time after time, miraculously fresh". He uses the example of young Petya Rostov (in War and Peace) "shivering with excitement as he waits to mount his horse on the morning he will die".
Coetzee the reader continues: "Even at a first reading, one has a premonition that on this misty autumn morning all will not go well for young Petya. The touches of foreshadowing that create the mood are easy enough to brush in, once we have been taught how, but from Tolstoy's pen the whole thing nevertheless emerges, time after time, miraculously fresh."
The second diary section contains the more endearing, personal entries. Following on from Tolstoy, he then confesses how rereading the fifth chapter of the second part of The Brothers Karamazov left him "sobbing uncontrollably". In the entry "On the Writing Life", he recalls: "During the years I spent as a professor of literature, conducting young people on tours of books that would always mean more to me than to them, I would cheer myself up by telling myself that at heart I was not a teacher but a novelist . . . now the critics voice a new refrain. At heart he is not a novelist after all, they say, but a pedant who dabbles in fiction."
This is an odd book, as odd and odder in ways, than the deeply unsatisfying Elizabeth Costello (2003), which emerged from a series of lectures delivered by Coetzee. Admittedly, Diary of a Bad Year contributes absolutely nothing to his formidable and enduring reputation, yet his admirers will want to read it as it does reveal that bit more about a most reticent and remarkable writer. And as always with Coetzee, there are those devastating moments of truth and insights of austere beauty.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Diary of A Bad Year By JM Coetzee Harvill Secker, 231pp. £16.99